SugarCRM is a software company based in

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo County ...

. It produces the on-premises and cloud-based

web application A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection. History In earlier computing models like client-serv ...

Sugar, a

customer relationship management Customer relationship management (CRM) is a process in which a business or other organization administers its interactions with customers, typically using data analysis to study large amounts of information. CRM systems compile data from a ra ...

(CRM) system. SugarCRM's functionality includes sales-force automation,

marketing campaign Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes to empha ...

customer support Customer support is a range of services to assist customers in making cost effective and correct use of a product. It includes assistance in planning, installation, training, troubleshooting, maintenance, upgrading, and disposal of a product. Reg ...

, collaboration, Mobile CRM, Social CRM and reporting. The company operates a number of websites, including its commercial website Sugarcrm.com and Sugar Outfitters (for third-party extensions), and an online user forum called SugarClub. In February 2014, in a blog post that provoked a strong reaction from the development community, SugarCRM announced that they would no longer be releasing new open-source versions of their Community Edition application; from now on this would be a bug-fix-only application.

History

John Roberts conceived of the idea and name of SugarCRM while riding his mountain bike named Sugar in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Clint Oram, John Roberts, and Jacob Taylor started full-time work on the SugarCRM open source project in April 2004, and incorporated the company in

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

in June 2004. Roberts served as the CEO from 2004 to 2009, Oram was the vice president, and Taylor was the CTO & vice president of engineering. In June 2004,

Josh B. Stein Josh Stein (born May 3, 1973) is an American businessman and venture capitalist. He is a managing partner at Threshold Ventures (formerly DFJ) and was featured in the Forbes Midas List in 2013, 2014 and 2015 in recognition of his accomplishments ...

of DFJ invested $2 million into the startup and became a board member. With the help of this investment, Sugar expanded quickly and by September 2004, potential users had downloaded 25,000 copies of the application, then named Sugar Open Source. In October 2004, the company was named "Project of the Month" on SourceForge. The popularity of this project allowed the company to raise $86 million of venture capital from

Draper Fisher Jurvetson Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) is an American venture capital firm focused on investments in enterprise, consumer and disruptive technologies. In January 2019, DFJ Venture, the early-stage team, spun out and formed Threshold Ventures. DFJ Growth ...

, Walden International,

New Enterprise Associates New Enterprise Associates (NEA) is an American-based venture capital firm. NEA focuses investment stages ranging from seed stage through growth stage across an array of industry sectors. With ~$25 billion in committed capital, NEA is one of the w ...

and

Goldman Sachs Goldman Sachs () is an American multinational investment bank and financial services company. Founded in 1869, Goldman Sachs is headquartered at 200 West Street in Lower Manhattan, with regional headquarters in London, Warsaw, Bangalore, H ...

. In 2006, SugarCRM launched SugarCon, a conference for Sugar customers, users and developers. It has since become an annual conference, held in the

San Francisco Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area Go ...

to begin with but in 2018 the conference was moved to Las Vegas. By 2008, SugarCRM employed over 150 people. In June 2008, co-founder Taylor left the company, during what technology website ''

The Register ''The Register'' is a British technology news website co-founded in 1994 by Mike Magee, John Lettice and Ross Alderson. The online newspaper's masthead sublogo is "''Biting the hand that feeds IT''." Their primary focus is information tec ...

'' called "a mysterious exodus of senior and experienced business staff" from SugarCRM.Sudden exit for SugarCRM co-founder and CEO
Gavin Clarke, ''

'', May 7, 2009 Clint Oram replaced him as the CTO. In May 2009, co-founder and CEO Roberts left the company. He was replaced as CEO by SugarCRM board member

Larry Augustin Larry Augustin (born October 10, 1962) is a VP at Amazon Web Services. He formerly was the chairman of the board of directors of SugarCRM. He is a former venture capitalist and the founder of VA Software (now Geeknet). During the height of the ...

, who had previously founded and served as the CEO of VA Linux (now known as

Geeknet Geeknet, Inc. is a Fairfax County, Virginia–based company that is a subsidiary of GameStop. The company was formerly known as VA Research, VA Linux Systems, VA Software, and SourceForge, Inc. History VA Research VA Research was founded in Nove ...

). In June 2010, Sugar launched Sugar 6, a major upgrade emphasizing ease of use and introducing a complete UI overhaul of Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise. In June 2017, SugarCRM released SugarCRM Hint, a new product which searches the web for additional information on users in SugarCRM. Private equity firm Accel-KKR became a single investor in August 2018, describing the investment as being "nine figures".

Editions

SugarCRM sells CRM software, typically referred to as Sugar, in three editions: * Sugar Professional * Sugar Enterprise * Sugar Ultimate Each product derives from the same code tree. The products originated on the

LAMP Lamp, Lamps or LAMP may refer to: Lighting * Oil lamp, using an oil-based fuel source * Kerosene lamp, using kerosene as a fuel * Electric lamp, or light bulb, a replaceable component that produces light from electricity * Light fixture, or li ...

stack (

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

Apache The Apache () are a group of culturally related Native American tribes in the Southwestern United States, which include the Chiricahua, Jicarilla, Lipan, Mescalero, Mimbreño, Ndendahe (Bedonkohe or Mogollon and Nednhi or Carrizaleño an ...

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database o ...

and

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group. ...

) but also run on other PHP-capable platforms (such as

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

Solaris Solaris may refer to: Arts and entertainment Literature, television and film * ''Solaris'' (novel), a 1961 science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem ** ''Solaris'' (1968 film), directed by Boris Nirenburg ** ''Solaris'' (1972 film), directed by ...

and

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

). SugarCRM can also use MS IIS as a web server,

IBM Db2 Db2 is a family of data management products, including database servers, developed by IBM. It initially supported the relational model, but was extended to support object–relational features and non-relational structures like JSON a ...

and MS SQL or Oracle as alternative databases.

Community edition

SugarCRM provided a community edition, Sugar CE, previously known as Sugar Open Source. It was available free of charge alongside paid editions until version 6.5. In 2013, Sugar version 7 was announced but was only released in Sugar's hosted paid environment. No update to the community edition was announced with it. SugarCRM's community support team have stated that 7.0 will not be available in a community edition, and that no release date for an updated community edition was known. After that SugarCRM released a notice saying that they "have no plans" to release 7 to Open Source. In April 2018, Clint Oram, CMO & Founder of SugarCRM, Inc., posted to the company's community blog that the Community Edition open source project had officially ended.

Deployment options

Sugar is a

software as a service Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software. SaaS is con ...

(SaaS) product. As of Sugar 7, customers can opt to use an on-premises product, SugarCRM's Sugar Cloud, one of SugarCRM's partners, or public cloud services (such as

Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. These cloud computing web services provide d ...

, Microsoft Azure,

Rackspace Cloud The Rackspace Cloud is a set of cloud computing products and services billed on a utility computing basis from the US-based company Rackspace. Offerings include Cloud Storage ("''Cloud Files''"), virtual private server ("''Cloud Servers''"), l ...

IBM SmartCloud IBM cloud computing is a set of cloud computing services for business offered by the information technology company IBM. IBM Cloud includes infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) offer ...

License

SugarCRM initially licensed Sugar Open Source under the SugarCRM Public License (based on the

Mozilla Public License The Mozilla Public License (MPL) is a free and open-source weak copyleft license for most Mozilla Foundation software such as Firefox and Thunderbird The MPL license is developed and maintained by Mozilla, which seeks to balance the concerns ...

and the Attribution Assurance License). While users could freely redistribute Sugar Open Source and the license allowed for the inspection and modification of the source code and for the creation of derived works, critics, including Dan Farber, editor in chief at CNET, expressed some concern over SugarCRM's use of the term "commercial open source" to describe its products. On July 25, 2007, SugarCRM announced the adoption of the GNU General Public License (version 3) for Sugar Community Edition, the offering previously known as Sugar Open Source. This license took effect with the release of Sugar Community Edition 5.0. On April 11, 2010, SugarCRM announced that starting with version 6.0.0, the Sugar Community Edition would be licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3. The charts module, customer portal, mobile support, some SOAP functions and most of the default theme templates were removed from the AGPLv3 licensed Sugar Community Edition 6. In 2014 the project announced there would only be proprietary licenses starting at Sugar 7. In 2020, a statement "SugarCRM is not an open source solution" could be found on SugarCRMs website. (see below in the FAQ section for "Is SugarCRM free?")

Open source forks of community edition

* Vtiger CRM, 2004 fork of V1.0 of SugarCRM * SarvCRM, 2012 fork of Community Edition 5.5.4 *

SuiteCRM SuiteCRM is a free open-source Customer Relationship Management application for servers that is written in PHP. It is a software fork of the popular customer relationship management (CRM) system from SugarCRM and its base is built on the last o ...

, 2013 fork of SugarCRM Community Edition 6.5 * SpiceCRM, 2016 fork of SugarCRM Community Edition adding an Angular-based UI leveraging Lightning Design from Salesforce

References

External links

* {{Authority control Business software for Linux Business software for macOS Business software for Windows Companies based in Cupertino, California Software companies established in 2004 Customer relationship management software companies Customer relationship management software PHP software Software companies based in California Software using the GNU AGPL license Software companies of the United States