Praised by Industry Experts, Sugar 5.0 positions company for continued growth Landmark Release Downloaded and Tested Over 30,000 Times by Community Members
Cupertino, CA (December 17, 2007) –
SugarCRM Inc., the world’s leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, today announced the general availability of Sugar 5.0, the fastest-growing CRM solution in the market today. Sugar 5.0 introduces a broad range of new functionality, including capabilities that allow users to build custom modules, a new AJAX email client and a state-of-the-art ‘Multi-Instance On-Demand’ architecture.
Sugar Community Edition 5.0 is available at http://www.sugarforge.org/content/downloads/ . To sign-up for a free trial of Sugar Professional 5.0, please visit: http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/ondemand_eval.html
SugarCRM’s commercial open source model invites the download and inspection of source code by users, developers, customers and partners, producing a higher quality product than possible in proprietary development models. The three beta editions of Sugar 5.0 were downloaded and tested over 30,000 times by community members during the beta process.
“Sugar 5.0 will be the growth platform for thousands of companies, including our own,” said John Roberts, CEO of SugarCRM. “We want to thank the thousands of developers and customers who reviewed the Sugar 5.0 beta code base and offered feedback to make Sugar 5.0 the most important release in our company’s history.”
“SugarCRM 5.0 delivers some smart, intriguing functionality that could challenge the heavyweights in the on-demand world as well as application platform providers,” says Paul Greenberg, author of CRM at the Speed of Light, “Their platform is flexible and creative and moves them directly into the war for the hearts and minds of the web and desktop.”
Sugar 5.0 Features
Sugar 5.0 introduces innovative features across CRM end-user features, platform functionality and on-demand architecture.
CRM End-User Features
Sugar 5.0 introduces the following functionality:
* New AJAX Email Client delivers the functionality of a desktop email client with the portability of a web-based email application.
* Improved Dashboards with new charting capabilities, including support for funnel, pie charts, line and bar graphs and performance gauge chart objects.
* Multiple Dashboards on Homepage allows users to access any number of pre-built or custom dashboards from their homepage. Users can easily add, edit, share, rearrange or remove dashboards with a few simple clicks.
Platform
Sugar 5.0 introduces a range of platform enhancements which enhance the ability to build, customize, scale, and upgrade the application. Key functionality enhancements include:
* New Metadata Driven User Interface (UI) stores customizations in a metadata repository. The Metadata Driven UI combines the benefits of custom CRM with the ability to easily incorporate new features in future releases.
* Improved Access Control offers better support for team hierarchies and access control functions that manage and protect information at the field level.
* New Module Builder enables users to build custom modules from scratch or combine existing or custom objects into a brand new module.
“Info-Tech Research Group believes Module Builder will be beneficial to companies that need company-specific and vertical industry process customization to SugarCRM, but lack the resources to engage in costly application extension through traditional application development,” says Tim Hickernell, Associate Senior Research analyst at Info-Tech Research Group. “We expect that the added incentive to allow third-party developers to generate revenue from selling custom modules will increase the number of available vertical industry add-ons to SugarCRM.”
On-Demand Architecture
In conjunction with the release of Sugar 5.0, SugarCRM is proud to unveil its new Multi-instance On-Demand architecture.
Key benefits include:
* Multi-Instance – Each customer receives their own On-Demand instance for maximum security, flexibility and control.
* Automatic Upgrades – Customers can be automatically upgraded to new versions of Sugar or control when to upgrade.
* Staging and Testing – Customers can develop new functionality on test servers and then move into production.
* Deployment Flexibility – Customers can move between Sugar On-Site and Sugar On-Demand at any time.
“With a thriving on-demand business already in place, SugarCRM could become a force in the emerging market where users will want their CRM supplier to have both on-site and SaaS offerings,” says the 451Group in a recent research report.
About SugarCRM
SugarCRM is the world’s leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software for companies of all sizes. SugarCRM easily adapts to any business environment by offering a more flexible, cost-effective alternative than proprietary applications. SugarCRM’s open source architecture allows companies to more easily customize and integrate customer-facing business processes in order to build and maintain more profitable relationships. SugarCRM offers several deployment options, including on-demand, on-premise and appliance-based solutions to suit customers’ security, integration and configuration needs.
For more information, call (408) 454-6900 or 1 877 SUGARCRM tollfree in the US, email contact@sugarcrm.com, or visit http://www.sugarcrm.com.
Media Contact:
Chris Harrick, charrick@sugarcrm.com (408) 454-6947
Source: SugarCRM