SugarCRM: Should Salesforce.com Be Worried?

Tom Taulli for Forbes writes: When it comes to CRM (customer relationship management) software, Salesforce.com CRM +0.84% seems to be the only option. 

Yet there are a variety of competitors making a dent in the company’s armor. Just look at SugarCRM. Founded about a decade ago, the company now has its software deployed by over 1.5 million individuals across 120 countries.

So to learn more about SugarCRM, I recently met with the company’s CEO, Larry Augustin.  He is a veteran of the tech business, having been the founder and CEO of VA Linux and also the interim CEO of Medsphere. Along the way, he has served as an advisor to various startups. 

Here’s what he had to say:

Tom Taulli: How is SugarCRM different from Salesforce.com? What’s your strategy for winning?

Larry Augustin: SugarCRM provides the most innovative and affordable CRM solution in the market. We are different in three key ways.

First, while most CRM systems focus solely on management tracking and reporting, SugarCRM puts the needs of the individual user first—fusing the seamless simplicity, mobility, and social aspects of a consumer app with the sales optimization of conventional CRM. The latest release of Sugar includes a significantly enhanced user interface called Sugar UX™, which offers an immersive, intuitive interface to CRM designed to help the individual contributor do their job. The SugarUX delivers contextual intelligence about every individual contact, company, lead, case, and opportunity, from internal data and external sources via an advanced Intelligence Panel; as well as enhanced collaboration features, including context-sensitive activity streams all on a single page.

Second, SugarCRM gives our customers complete flexibility in how they deploy the system. We offer a multi-tenant cloud service, a private instance in the cloud, and also allow customers to deploy on their own internal clouds. This gives customers a level of control they can’t achieve in a proprietary SaaS-only model where their data is locked up in one vendor’s data silo. This allows our customers to more easily comply with international data security and privacy laws, lowers the costs of integration and makes it easier for our customers to create a unified view of their customer data across systems. [snip].  The article continues @ Forbes.com, click here to continue reading.