Writing from Tampa, “having just finished three days of meetings in Houston and Tampa with new and prospective customers,” a certain Bill Harrison, of Epicom, finds that “if there is a single theme that can be drawn through these three days it is the tremendous value of SugarCRM (News - Alert) as a platform for very diverse and complex CRM applications.”

Not content with basic sales pipeline and customer service management, Harrison says, “I’m seeing new customers using relatively inexpensive, mid-market CRM systems to automate, track, and manage nearly every aspect of their business except accounting. And with real-time integrations to accounting and ERP systems, even some accounting functions are falling on the shoulders of the CRM system.”

But that's not all – what Harrison finds “most interesting” is that these complex projects “can now be completed far more quickly and for a fraction of the cost of similar projects attempted only a few years ago.”

Maybe that's part of the reason why last month TMC (News - Alert) reported that Everything Channel’s CRN Magazine called open source CRM provider SugarCRM one of the “100 Coolest Cloud Computing Products” and named Vice President of Sales Jeff Campbell as a CRN “Channel Chief.”

Campbell said “it is an honor to be recognized by the Everything Channel and is a testament to the quality and value SugarCRM and its global network of partners are delivering to customers.”

Harrison relates meeting with a large manufacturer of industrial equipment with about $650 million in annual revenue, who's using SugarCRM to “push critical customer information to its far-flung sales force.” They’ll also use Sugar for traditional sales opportunity management functions like keeping up with their sales pipeline, but the real value of the system, Harrison thinks, will be “a tight integration with their ERP system, which is closed and difficult to use.” 

Harrison also visited a specialty electronics distributor in Tampa looking to use SugarCRM as a platform for delivering complex customer data to its inside and outside sales reps. Traditionally, he notes, “an application like this would have been built from scratch or a set of custom analytic dashboards would have been built using an expensive business intelligence tool.”

But with SugarCRM, our prospect “will be able to take advantage of robust customer and activity management capabilities built into Sugar out of the box, and then layer a sophisticated customer dashboard system on top of this base.”