SugarCRM Announces Release of Cloud Connectors

SugarCRM has announced the release of new Cloud Connectors for SugarCRM (News - Alert), which allow for company and contact data residing in other cloud environments to be called and presented in SugarCRM.

 

The product also has what company officials are calling “Sugar Feeds,” which provide a rolling set of notices and alerts based on activity within SugarCRM. These features, as well as new management features for administering modules, will be generally available at the end of this month.

 

In October, Apatar, which sells open source software aimed at the data integration market, announced connectivity to the SugarCRM open source suite.

 

Apatar officials said the new SugarCRM connector is designed to integrate data between their customer relation management system and what company officials describe as "a variety of third-party data sources, allowing for this data to be filtered, validated, and cleansed."

 

As for the Cloud Connectors announcement, “this new functionality integrates business data and social intelligence from the cloud into the SugarCRM user experience,” says John Roberts (News - Alert), CEO of SugarCRM, adding that the features were intended to provide “immediacy and interaction” from Web applications.” 

 

In November, TMC’s Stefania Viscusi reported that the company announced that Bright House Networks and Broadcore (News - Alert) chose to implement the Sugar Enterprise offering on-site.

 

“For Bright House Networks,  a company with 2.4 million customers in several large market and the nation’s sixth largest multi-service operator, Sugar Enterprise offers a new customer interaction hub, implemented by SugarCRM Gold Partner, Levementum, that can be used by the companies entire personnel to manage customer lifecycles,” she wrote.

 

Viscusi reported that Lee Vinton, manager of business engineering services at BHN, said the product “needed to be flexible and open enough to adapt to existing business-processes while at the same time lowering our total cost of ownership and integration with our existing IT infrastructure,.”

 

The Cloud Connectors connect via Web Services to such third-party data service providers as Hoover’s, JigSaw and LinkedIn for account and lead information. Cloud Views provide users a one-click preview of information retrieved, and Data Merge lets users select data from multiple data providers and merge it into SugarCRM.

 

For example: When a SugarCRM user views a new lead within SugarCRM, a pop-up Cloud View will provide information about the company for the lead qualification process. Using Cloud Views, the user can see what connections he has at the company via LinkedIn, or preview detailed company statistics from Hoover’s. What he likes he can import into SugarCRM via Data Merge.

 

Other Cloud Connectors available now include Zoominfo and Crunchbase, which are available for download at Sugar Exchange.