Feature Story

By Kat Rollin

March 18, 2008 — Whether you're just starting out or have been in business for years, you need an efficient , flexible way to manage customer relationships. And as a small or medium business, you need to conserve cash where ever possible, without compromising quality. With an open source version of SugarCRM's customer relationship management (CRM) system and Sun's OpenOffice.org suite, you can start evaluating a proven solution at the right price, and grow when you need to.

Free and Open CRM

SugarCRM is a leading provider of open source CRM solutions licensed. SugarCRM Community Edition is licensed under GPLv3 and offers a flexible alternative to proprietary applications and easily adapts into existing environments. Its open architecture allows companies to customize and integrate customer-facing business processes in order to build and maintain more profitable relationships. SugarCRM's open-source community includes 65,000 members and 12,000 developers, who contribute extensions to enhance functionality and translate Sugar into other languages. As with other open source projects such as OpenSolaris and OpenOffice, this means new, innovative features reach you faster, and less expensively, than they would with proprietary solutions.

With SugarCRM Community Edition, you can try out one of the leading CRM solutions available, for as long as you want, and customize it the way you want. And, with Sun's Try and Buy program, you can evaluate SugarCRM Community Edition (after downloading from SugarCRM) on Sun systems for 60 days free and then buy at 25 to 45 percent off. Or, if you're a startup, you can get deeply discounted systems through Sun's Startup Essentials program. Then when you're ready, you can engage with SugarCRM to move to a fully supported production solution such as Sugar Professional or Sugar Enterprise.

Free and Open Integration with OpenOffice

In order to fully realize the potential of SugarCRM, you need to be able to easily and cost-effectively integrate it with content creation applications such as Microsoft Word or OpenOffice Writer. For example, if you need to quickly develop email offers, you need a way to import the customer data from Sugar into the template you're creating, without the tedious manual process of going back and forth between applications.

Businesses, governments, and organizations around the world are turning to the OpenOffice.org suite — the world's most widely distributed open-source, multiplatform and multilingual productivity suite. The OpenOffice.org suite runs on Windows, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, and many other platforms. To help you conserve even more cash, Sun offers OpenOffice Extension for SugarCRM Solution, which is designed specifically to extend the functionality of Sugar by integrating it with OpenOffice Writer — and it's free of charge, as well as easy to download and install.

With Sugar, the OpenOffice.org suite, and OpenOffice Extension for SugarCRM Solutions, you can quickly send email promotions as sales opportunities arise, while your competition is busy collecting lists, scrubbing data, and manually merging mail promotions.

A Solutions that Grows with You

SugarCRM offers several deployment options, including on-demand, on-premise, and appliance-based solutions to suit your needs and your budget. With on-demand, you pay for the compute power you use. Appliance-based solutions enable you to quickly deploy the solution in-house, or at the rack-hosting vendor of your choice. Finally, on-premise provides the flexibility to deploy the applications on the platform of your choice. And there's no better platform than Sun for cost-conscious businesses, especially for startups that qualify for the Sun Startup Essentials program.

Sun systems power businesses around the world, from the smallest to the largest. The beauty of Sun systems is three-fold. First, outstanding price/performance enables you to deploy some of the most powerful and reliable systems available, so your applications stay up under demand. Second, every company is trying to reduce energy use, and Sun systems run cool and use comparatively little power. Third, Sun is the only company that offers scalability from the smallest single core system to the largest 128 core system — without changing the operating system. So you can start small, with open source SugarCRM, OpenOffice, and even OpenSolaris, and as you grow, move to commercially-supported versions, all on the same hardware platform.

SugarCRM and Sun

SugarCRM and Sun have been working together to provide innovative and practical solutions for CRM. With SugarCRM Community Edition, OpenOffice.org suite, and free OpenOffice Extension for SugarCRM Solutions, as well as SugarCRM Professional, or Sun's Startup Essentials program, or Sun Try and Buy, you can start using one of the most popular CRM solutions available to manage one of your most important assets, your relationships with customers — and you can do it at the right price.

Formerly a systems engineer for Sun, Kat Rollin now reports on partner solutions for sun.com and develops technical marketing communications for the technology industry.