Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » SugarCRM: 1,000 customers and growing

December 18, 2006 | Comments: (0)

SugarCRM: 1,000 customers and growing

TAGS: Open Source

I knew SugarCRM was going well, but didn't know precisely how to publicly quantify that "well." Sugar has done that job for me, announcing today that it has passed the 1,000 customers mark. (Not announced, but equally significant, is the increasingly "enterprise-y" nature of these customers. Customers like Starbucks.)

Interestingly, a decent percentage of these customers are coming from...Salesforce.com. One of these is Sterling PCU, as noted in the press release:

Sterling PCU, provider of specialized equipment for the appliance and automotive industry switched from salesforce.com to SugarCRM after getting fed up with hidden costs. Sterling expects to save $18,000 annually, paying $239 per user with Sugar instead of $780 per user with salesforce.com.

"Things were fine with salesforce.com until we tried to do a second database back-up," said Christopher Edwards, General Manager of Sales at Sterling PCU. "That is when salesforce.com started to charge us an arm and leg for backing up our own data. It's just not acceptable. It is our data, they do not own it, we do. We moved from salesforce.com to SugarCRM because Sugar gives us twice the functionality at half the price. SugarCRM also gives us the flexibility we need to grow as a business."

Since switching to Sugar, Sterling has achieved a 90% user adoption level. The company is currently using Sugar On-Demand but will most likely move customer assets to Sugar On-Premise in the future, a flexibility salesforce.com cannot provide.

Tim O'Reilly has written many times about how data is "the new Intel inside." Put more crassly, data is the new lock-in. This is one of those fine-print sort of things that Salesforce.com and other web-based companies don't want their customers to think much about, but it's one of the biggest reasons to go open source:

An enterprise's data, or content, belongs to it. The vendor should not own it. Open source largely precludes the possibility of a vendor locking in the customer's data/content. There is no conscionable reason for vendors to hold their customers hostage.

As customers realize this, they will increasingly opt for the freedom of open source. In the CRM world, that means SugarCRM. Congratulations to John, Jacob, Clint, and team on crossing the 1,000 customer threshold. You've earned it.

Full disclosure: I am on SugarCRM's advisory board.
Fuller disclosure: I would write this anyway, because I think SugarCRM is a great product and a great company (which is why I agreed to be on the advisory board in the first place.)
Fullest disclosure: I am also a SugarCRM customer. I think Alfresco is Customer #743 or so. I didn't even get a T-shirt for that. :-)

Posted by Matt Asay on December 18, 2006 07:15 AM

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