New Product Capabilities, Along with Integrations to Leading Social Business Providers like IBM, Google, Cisco and Citrix Online Extend SugarCRM Leadership in Social CRM
SAN FRANCISCO (April 05, 2011) – SugarCRM, the world’s fastest growing customer relationship management (CRM) company, today announced new additions to Sugar 6 that enhance the product’s existing position as the leading CRM platform for social business. Highlights include integration with leading applications from IBM, Google, Cisco WebEx, Citrix Online, and InsideView, as well as enhanced Sugar Activity Streams inside Sugar 6. The announcements were made here at SugarCon, the company’s annual customer, partner and developer event.
“Today’s professionals are demanding business tools that enable them to work the way they want to work
IBM and Sugar Make CRM Social
SugarCRM is announcing major improvements to its integration offerings for the IBM Lotus Collaboration product family, resulting from today’s announced acquisition of iExtensions CRM from iEnterprises. SugarCRM adds support for the IBM Lotus Notes product line, including native CRM support for the Notes platform and a Lotus Notes email and calendar plug-in. This new combination of additional functionality and connectors creates a fully integrated collaboration suite within Sugar. The Sugar Plug-In for Notes is available for both Windows and the Mac operating systems. In addition, a new Sugar Connector for Lotus Domino has also been made available from SugarCRM for synchronizing CRM data between Sugar and Domino servers.
SugarCRM and IBM are also announcing general availability of Sugar for IBM LotusLive, first introduced earlier this year. Sugar for LotusLive enables Sugar 6 users to quickly schedule and host web meetings from inside their CRM solution, creating a more wide-reaching social collaboration platform. Sugar for LotusLive also enables users to upload, share and collaborate on important documents, such as quotes or contracts, right inside the Sugar 6 application
“Social businesses are more engaged with their customers, partners and colleagues,” said Sean Poulley, vice president, Social Business Cloud at IBM and a keynote speaker at this year’s SugarCon. “The integration of SugarCRM and LotusLive allows deeper levels of collaboration across company boundaries making the process of supporting your customers and building loyalty easier and more effective.”
“This IBM/SugarCRM alliance makes a great deal of sense to me,” said Paul Greenberg, president of the 56 Group and best-selling author of “CRM at the Speed of Light,” now in its fourth edition. “Adding SugarCRM to IBM’s Global Alliance Portfolio gives IBM more weapons in its CRM arsenal as it approaches modern business problems, while the alliance gives SugarCRM a great entry in new enterprise business segments.”
As part of the launch of Sugar for LotusLive, IBM is offering all new SugarCRM customers a 30-day free trial of LotusLive. For more information and to start your free trial, visit: http://www.sugarcrm.com/lotuslive
Additional Collaboration Tools
In addition to the LotusLive integration, the latest edition of Sugar 6 will also offer integrations with popular web meeting tools including Cisco WebEx Meeting Center and Citrix-GoToMeeting. Also, Sugar 6 users will be able to upload, manage and share Google Docs right inside the Sugar 6 user interface. The open and flexible Sugar 6 platform offers users choice in how they wish to build their own social business processes.
Enhanced Activity Streams
The latest edition of Sugar 6 includes enhanced Sugar Activity Streams, which foster greater internal and external collaboration, cementing Sugar 6 as the most wide-reaching social CRM platform on the market. New features in Sugar Activity Streams include the ability to reply to individual posts, view user profile photos within posts, integrate a Sugar user’s Facebook news feeds, as well as integrate the Twitter streams that a Sugar user follows.
Sugar Activity Streams are designed to support the new Activity Streams standard, leveraged by leading social media and other collaboration tools on the market today. This will enable greater integration of external data sources and social channels into SugarCRM to promote the most robust social CRM experiences available.
InsideView and Sugar 6 Provide Sales Intelligence
Building off the existing integration between Sugar and SalesView, the sales intelligence solution from InsideView, the companies are announcing a combined social CRM and sales intelligence solution. The latest edition of Sugar 6 will include SalesView pre-loaded into the system. This offers users the ability to tap into thousands of global data sources, as well as the vast universe of social media to gain relevant and actionable insight into their prospects and customers.
“A CRM system is only as good as the data inside of it,” said Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView. “By accessing real-time sales intelligence and relevant social information within Sugar 6, users can discover prospects, qualify leads, engage decision-makers, close deals and grow customer relationships more quickly. SalesView and Sugar together form the building blocks of a winning social CRM strategy for any business.”
Pricing and Availability
The latest edition of Sugar 6 remains priced at $30 per user, per month for Professional Edition and $50 per user, per month for Enterprise Edition. The new features will be generally available this spring.
To learn more about Sugar 6 or to access a free trial, visit: http://www.sugarcrm.com/freetrial
To learn more about the SugarCon event and interact with speakers, partners and Sugar executives
To learn more about the latest additions to Sugar 6, join SugarCRM for a free webinar on Thursday, April 21. Register for this webinar at: https://sugarcrmevents.webex.com/sugarcrmevents/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=661340210
About SugarCRM
SugarCRM makes CRM Simple. As the world’s fastest growing customer relationship management (CRM) company, SugarCRM applications have been downloaded more than nine million times and currently serve over 800,000 end users in 80 countries. Over 7,000 customers have chosen SugarCRM’s On-Site and Cloud Computing services over proprietary alternatives. SugarCRM has been recognized for its customer success and product innovation by CRM Magazine, InfoWorld, Customer Interaction Solutions and Intelligent Enterprise.
For more information, call (408) 454-6900 or 1 87 SUGARCRM toll-free in the US, email contact@sugarcrm.com, or visit http://www.sugarcrm.com.
Source: SugarCRM