SugarCRM Expands Position in Development of Social Business Open Standards

SugarCRM, a fast-growing customer relationship management (CRM) company, has announced it has taken on new leadership roles with the OpenSocial Foundation to drive the development of social business open standards. SugarCRM’s CTO and co-founder, Clint Oram, has been appointed to the board, and John Mertic, SugarCRM community manager has been appointed as secretary.

“The OpenSocial Foundation is pleased to have SugarCRM as the open source leader in the CRM industry join the board,” said Mark Weitzel, president of the OpenSocial Foundation and director, platform and ecosystem for Jive Software. “Together, we are enabling a rapidly growing ecosystem of cloud-based social business applications, driving innovation in the social web. Our forthcoming release of the OpenSocial standard will set an exciting new benchmark for social computing.”

Mertic said, “OpenSocial has clearly become the industry standard for social-enabled applications. With OpenSocial, SugarCRM will deliver an immersive social application experience spanning across multiple business process flows and business applications. We are excited to be a guiding member of this standards body.”

As a member of the OpenSocial Foundation, SugarCRM will collaborate with key members, including IBM and Jive Software, to set the next-generation standard for social integrations in the enterprise. The OpenSocial Foundation will hold its annual meeting, the OpenSocial State of the Union 2012, on July 17th in conjunction with OSCON 2012 in Portland, Oregon.

“Unlike the proprietary models for social business solutions that are being touted by legacy CRM vendors, SugarCRM is working with other open standards leaders like Jive and IBM to develop open social business solutions that integrate and interoperate between best-of-breed solutions,” said Oram.

SugarCRM’s Open Platform and Business Model Drives Community Growth

The SugarCRM developer community continues to show strong growth, contributing to over 11 million downloads of Sugar Community Edition (CE) to date. During Q2 2012 alone, Sugar CE has been downloaded over 130,000 times from open source software site SourceForge, and it is currently the number one CRM project with approximately one download per minute.

“The global software market is increasingly recognising that open source CRM gives organisations the flexibility to connect with customers any way that works for them,” Oram added. “And for SugarCRM, the open source model isn’t just about exposing code – we put openness at the very heart of our business, and we’re working on building transparency and trust into all of our interactions with the Sugar community.”

Thriving Ecosystem Accelerates Product Development and Quality

The SugarCRM Open+ Partner Program includes a robust network of over 200 development organisations who are certified on the Sugar Agile Development Methodology and directly contribute to the development of the SugarCRM product line – making the product better at a faster rate than would be possible with a proprietary CRM solution. During the last 12 months, over 150 code contributions from the community have been contributed and merged back into the core source tree of SugarCRM. Some of the latest community projects incorporated into SugarCRM include:
• ECalendar: An enhanced calendar management solution with a more responsive AJAX user interface along with drag-and-drop editing of calls and meetings.
• iCal Patch: An extension of the vCal functionality of SugarCRM, enabling publishing of iCal-compatible vCals, and allowing Sugar calendars to be viewed within any iCal-compatible program such as Apple iCal or Google Calendar.
Letrium is an organisation comprised of community developers who have built several add-ons for SugarCRM, including the ECalendar add-on. “Users were looking to us to build a sophisticated calendar that integrated with SugarCRM, and SugarCRM was so pleased with the outcome of our project, they decided to collaborate with us to integrate our code back into the core application,” said Yuri Kuznetsov, developer at Letrium. “SugarCRM offers a flexible platform that’s easy for us to work with, and we are always seeking new, creative ways to flex the power of the application. We look forward to working on more collaborations with SugarCRM.”

With over 33,000 registered developers and more than 1,000 projects on SugarForge.org, the SugarCRM developer community plays a key role in the on-going development and enhancement of all of SugarCRM’s products. Since customers and developers have complete access to the Sugar platform, they can actively modify, extend, and integrate Sugar to meet the unique needs of their organisations. SugarCRM developers share their solutions on SugarForge, SugarCRM’s developer community resource, and SugarExchange, SugarCRM’s commercial repository of extensions and complementary applications. For more information, visit the SugarCRM Developer blog, or the Community webpage.

SugarCRM makes CRM simple. As the world's fastest growing customer relationship management (CRM) company, SugarCRM applications have been downloaded more than 11 million times and currently serve over 1,000,000 end users. Over 7,000 organisations have chosen SugarCRM's On-Site and Cloud Computing services over proprietary alternatives. SugarCRM has been recognised for its customer success and product innovation by CRM Magazine, InfoWorld and Customer Interaction Solutions.
For more information, call (408) 454-6900 or 1 87 SUGARCRM toll-free in the US, email contact@sugarcrm.com, or visit www.sugarcrm.com. You can also connect with SugarCRM on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.