SugarCRM

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 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 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, Walden International, New Enterprise Associates and Goldman Sachs.

In 2006, SugarCRM launched SugarCon, a conference for Sugar customers, users and developers, that has since become an annual conference, held in the San Francisco Bay Area.

By 2008, SugarCRM employed over 150 people.

In June 2008, co-founder Taylor left the company, during what technology website The Register called "a mysterious exodus of senior and experienced business staff" from SugarCRM. 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, who had previously founded and served as the CEO of VA Linux (now known as Geeknet).

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 early 2011, Sugar was selected as an IBM Global Alliance Partner for Cloud Services.

In January 2011, SugarCRM co-founder John Roberts started X2Engine CRM, a new open source project.

In June 2011, SugarCRM continued building on the Sugar 6 theme by adding more global capabilities (25 languages), enhanced Mobile CRM (native application support for over 90% of the world's smartphones and tablets) and extensive Social CRM integrations (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, InsideView, LotusLive, WebEx, GoToMeeting, and Google Docs). As part of this release, Sugar introduced two new editions; Sugar Corporate and Sugar Ultimate. eWeek said of Sugar 6 that SugarCRM gets it right.

At SugarCon 2012, SugarCRM announced the Sugar 6.5 release. This new release offers customers an updated UI; more powerful search capabilities, an updated calendar and faster performance. The 6.5 release also introduces additional support for different IBM software and hardware platforms. Sugar 6.5 went GA in June 2012.

In October 2013, SugarCRM released the latest version, Sugar 7, with a complete new Interface, called Sugar UX. They also introduced Sugar PurePrice with a clear and simple pricing structure for all three available editions.

In May 2015, Clint Oram, mentioned that with SugarCRM 7, it was easier for the company to target and win trust of enterprise customers. This was attributed to separation of opensource and commercial versions. This was necessary as enterprise readiness of the solution was being discussed.

In June 2016, SugarCRM launched Sugar Intelligence a new product line that will tap Service will tap AI and offer predictive analytics. Part of the launch included a sneak peak at "Candace" an intelligent digital assistant.

Editions

SugarCRM sells CRM software, typically referred to as Sugar, in four editions:

Each product derives from the same code tree. The products originated on the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) but also run on other PHP-capable platforms (such as Windows, Solaris and Mac OS X). SugarCRM can also use MS IIS as a web server, DB2 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. As of now, the open source version is outdated and the UI is outdated.

Deployment options

Sugar is a software as a service (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, Windows Azure, Rackspace Cloud or IBM SmartCloud).

License

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

Open source forks of community edition