SugarCRM to Focus on Management

SugarCRM (News - Alert), a vendor of commercial open source customer relationship management software, will host an interactive Webinar panel on Wednesday, October 22 titled "From Pipeline Management to Total Customer Management," featuring SugarCRM customers Bright House Networks and Levementum, a professional services firm.

 

Attendees will hear about drivers for CRM evaluation and selection, how to adapt CRM to enhance existing business processes, how to use commercial open source SugarCRM as a platform, how to create a Total Customer Management product, why tracking customer data alone does not drive customer satisfaction and how to lower the cost of ownership, SugarCRM officials say.

 

It starts 10:00 a.m. PDT, 1:00 p.m. EDT and lasts one hour, including Q&A time. Register at www.sellingpower.com/Webinars2/october/sugar_crm/sugar/index.asp .

 

In August, SugarCRM announced the general availability of Sugar 5.1, which includes new reporting and wireless capabilities for SugarCRM.

 

The reporting and analytics engine provides SugarCRM users with "improved insight into sales effectiveness and customer behavior," company officials said, adding that the "revamped wireless capabilities" allow SugarCRM to be used on mobile phones, including support for the BlackBerry and iPhone (News - Alert) smartphones.  

 

SugarCRM's commercial open source model invites the download and inspection of source code by users, developers, customers and partners, on the theory that this produces a higher quality product than possible in proprietary development models. During the beta process, Sugar 5.1 was installed over 10,000 times and tested by over 25,000 users.

 

Since its founding four years ago, Sugar Community Edition and its related components have been downloaded over 5 million times. SugarCRM's user base consists of over 400,000 users on 50,000 installations in 195 countries.

 

"Software is transitioning from lock-in based proprietary systems to an open, standards-based world," thinks John Roberts (News - Alert), CEO of SugarCRM.

 

Sugar 5.1, company officials say, offers such features and improvements across end-user and administrative functions as advanced reporting and analytics to "provide support for complex reporting sets, matrix reports, run-time filters and integration with Excel."

 

There's also a new wireless HTML client and improved user interface, and tracker reports to "provide a snapshot into system usage in order to increase user adoption and visibility into CRM use."