SugarCRM: SugarCON 2008 Day 1

Well if you have not heard about SugarCRM it is an open source CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software package that utilizes the language PHP to interact with a MySQL database.

What does that mean for you? Well depending on your organization’s size it can mean you can obtain fully-featured contact management software that has an upfront cost of $0. The only thing it really requires is a web server running either Windows or *nix operating system. To obtain PHP and MySQL will cost you $0 as well.  This can be a great software package for those who are wishing to start up a business but do not want to spend money on things such as Maximizer or ACT.

I don’t believe you, nothing is free!

The Community version of SugarCRM is free, though you only get technical support from the SugarCRM Community. If you buy the Professional or Enterprise version then you get technical support from SugarCRM’s support department. The online Sugar Community is huge though and very helpful if you choose not to pay. Though depending on your needs the paid versions do offer some other features you might need but I’ll not go into that as you can check them out at their website.

Open Source is here to stay.

What is Open Source? Well the quick version is software companies allow you access to the code. This allows you to tailor the program to your needs and even help the company create better features or improve existing ones. It allows for better customization as well.

That’s all great, what about SugarCON?

SugarCON is a Customer and Developer conference held every year by SugarCRM and a few vendors such as MySQL, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, RIM (Research In Motion) to name a few. They offer various small workshops (more like informational sessions) about various aspects of the SugarCRM package including where it is headed in the future.

They also have Keynote speakers. The first day the CEO of SugarCRM John Roberts gave everyone an introduction about SugarCRM and various aspects into the world of CRM as well as his company. The ‘Fake Steve Jobs’, aka Daniel Lyons, of Frobes talked about the open source community and what was in store for the industry. He also poked fun at Microsoft and other large companies. After lunch the President and CEO of Sun Microsystem's Jonathan Schwartz  also talked.  Recently Sun purchased MySQL for a lovely sum of $1 Billion and he gave his thoughts and reason behind the acquisition. MySQL’s business model and that they are expected to have $100 Million in annual sales were a couple of the reasons for the purchase though they want to be able to help MySQL grow and be more scalable as customers’ needs increase for database software. They also plan on keeping it free.

Overall the first day was pretty informative. I have learned a couple things about SugarCRM that could be useful for my employer such as how the new version of SugarCRM (ver 5.0) is more modular and easier to customize for our purposes or that setting up scheduled email campaigns for our sales department is easy to do with cron jobs.