SugarCRM
Company: SugarCRM, Cupertino, CA, US
Entry Submitted By: Spark PR
Company Description:Manage your sales, marketing, and customer support better with SugarCRM's online CRM software
Nomination Category: New Product & Service Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Relationship Management Solution – New Version
Nomination Title: SugarCRM's Sugar 6.5
Tell the story about this nominated product or service (up to 500 words). Describe its function, features, benefits, and sales to date:
We live in a global economy with businesses operating across many different geographies and with varying budgets. They all want to reach out to customers in an efficient and cost-effective way, and SugarCRM makes this possible.
To address these needs, SugarCRM introduced the latest version of its CRM application, Sugar 6.5, in Spring 2012which included significant architectural enhancements, as well as performance improvements to increase productivity and end-user satisfaction.
Prior versions of Sugar were ocused on sales management, whereas Sugar 6.5 puts the end-users first. By arming professionals with an easy-to-use application that they can access from any browser or mobile device, Sugar is heavily focused on enabling increased user productivity with simplified navigation through an enhanced user interface design, full-text search functionality, and new calendar and scheduling capabilities.
Today’s version of Sugar empowers every professional who interacts with customers to excel at their job. SugarCRM’s open CRM platform delivers the agility, flexibility, and security required to equip each customer-facing professional with the relevant information and tools they need to effectively collaborate and engage with their customer, both within and beyond the enterprise.
Sugar gives frees customers from the limits of other, more restrictive CRM solutions. Sugar can support any business application and runs anywhere, allowing the customer to decide how to deploy their CRM solution: ¬private cloud, public cloud, vendor-hosted, or behind the firewall. It also provides the flexibility to change as the customer¹s needs change. i.e., a company may start with a hosted application and then decide to bring it in-house. The customer has full ownership of his data, customizations and integrations throughout. Not many software vendors can provide this kind of flexibility.
Sugar also includes social CRM capabilities and dramatically expands the ability to collaborate with customers and partners no matter where they are located. To further enable successful sales, Sugar allows sales teams to take advantage of current business data, aggregated from both traditional media and social media tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Mobile employees are an increasingly important business asset. Sugar supports teams with mobile- appropriate clients across a broad range of platforms: Android, BlackBerry, and iPhone/iPad. Offline Sync helps when network connections are intermittent (think frequent flyers), while Sugar’s HTML5 charting engine ensures that reports are readable across mobile platforms.
Adding to the flexibility of the solution, SugarCRM has open source roots. That means customers and developers can have complete access to our open platform, making Sugar an extremely flexible CRM solution. As businesses grow, and as business and social networks evolve, Sugar can easily be modified, extended and integrated with third party business applications to meet changing needs quickly and effectively. This makes Sugar a long-term solution that will continue to add value after other CRM applications have become obsolete.
SugarCRM applications have been downloaded more than 11 million times and currently help over 1,000,000 end users across disciplines effectively engage their customers. Over 7,000 organizations have chosen SugarCRM's on-site and cloud computing services over proprietary alternatives.
Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader(s) of the team that developed this nominated product or service:
Lila is responsible for engineering and technology operations at SugarCRM. She has a background in enterprise software, spanning multiple verticals. She focuses on building robust products and the redundant, highly-available systems to support their delivery.
Prior to SugarCRM, Lila led development of solutions for the telecommunications space for numerous Fortune 500 customers. She was responsible for development of network applications for enterprise partners such as VeriSign. Lila delivered distributed enterprise software for large customers such as Bank of America.
Lila studied computer science and design at University of California at Berkeley and Lomonosov Moscow State University.