SugarCRM is a software company based in

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is 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 area of the Santa Clara Valley ...

. It produces the on-premises and cloud-based

web application A web application (or web app) is application software that is created with web technologies and runs via a web browser. Web applications emerged during the late 1990s and allowed for the server to dynamically build a response to the request, ...

Sugar, a

customer relationship management Customer relationship management (CRM) is a strategic process that organizations use to manage, analyze, and improve their interactions with customers. By leveraging data-driven insights, CRM helps businesses optimize communication, enhance cus ...

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

marketing campaign Marketing is the act of acquiring, satisfying and retaining customers. It is one of the primary components of Business administration, business management and commerce. Marketing is usually conducted by the seller, typically a retailer or ma ...

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. Rega ...

collaboration Collaboration (from Latin ''com-'' "with" + ''laborare'' "to labor", "to work") is the process of two or more people, entities or organizations working together to complete a task or achieve a goal. Collaboration is similar to cooperation. The ...

, 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 Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

project in April 2004, and incorporated the company in

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

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 is an American venture capitalist and businessman. He is managing partner at Threshold Ventures (formed out of Draper Fisher Jurvetson), and held or holds board responsibilities at a number of startup companies. , this included Box (c ...

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. In January 2019, DFJ Venture, the early-stage team, spun out and formed Threshold Ventures. DFJ Growth continues to be managed by co-founder John Fisher and co-founders Mark Ba ...

Walden International Pacven Walden Management Co., Ltd. (doing business as Walden International) is an American venture capital firm based in San Francisco, California. It mainly focuses on investments in Asia and is one of the earliest venture capital firms to inv ...

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 over $25 billion in committed capital, NEA is one of t ...

and

Goldman Sachs The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational investment bank and financial services company. Founded in 1869, Goldman Sachs is headquartered in Lower Manhattan in New York City, with regional headquarters in many internationa ...

. 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, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a List of regions of California, region of California surrounding and including San Francisco Bay, and anchored by the cities of Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose, California, S ...

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'' (often also called El Reg) is a British Technology journalism, technology news website co-founded in 1994 by Mike Magee (journalist), Mike Magee and John Lettice. The online newspaper's Nameplate_(publishing), masthead Logo, s ...

'' 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 former 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 ...

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

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

). 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 in on-premises and Cloud variants: Sales force automation includes: * Sugar Sell (available in Essentials, Advanced, and Premier editions) * Sugar Enterprise on-premises (available in Enterprise and Enterprise+ editions) Sugar Market (marketing automation) and Sugar Serve (customer service software) are also offered, along with several additional optional capabilities.

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 cloud computing service model where the provider offers use of application software to a client and manages all needed physical and software resources. SaaS is usually accessed via a web application. Unlike o ...

(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.com, Amazon that provides Software as a service, on-demand cloud computing computing platform, platforms and Application programming interface, APIs to individuals, companies, and gover ...

Microsoft Azure Microsoft Azure, or just Azure ( /ˈæʒər, ˈeɪʒər/ ''AZH-ər, AY-zhər'', UK also /ˈæzjʊər, ˈeɪzjʊər/ ''AZ-ure, AY-zure''), is the cloud computing platform developed by Microsoft. It has management, access and development of ...

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''"), lo ...

or IBM SmartCloud).

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 is developed and maintained by Mozilla, which seeks to balance the concerns of bo ...

and the Attribution Assurance License). While users could freely redistribute Sugar 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 updated is license management support for it licensed products and could be found on SugarCRMs website.

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, 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 Affero General Public License Software companies of the United States