We’re thrilled to relay that one of our favorite business technology companies, SugarCRM, recently announced new company-wide changes! These changes will improve the value of their services and their relationships with customers. They have unveiled:

• A new vision and mission
• A new and expanded product portfolio
• A new website and brand
• A new customer conference
• New investors, acquisitions, and executive teams

Despite these changes, Sugar is still the same company with the same core values – they’re just evolving their business model, product portfolio, and platform features.

Sugar’s New Business Model

Sugar’s new approach to their technology and services is to enable you and your business to create customers for life with a stellar customer experience (CX) platform that will help you anticipate and fulfill customer needs before they even realize they have them.

To support this approach, Sugar has defined their competitive differentiators and leadership position – organized into three “pillars” – within the business technology market to communicate their strengths and future aspirations. These three pillars are:

Intelligent Customer Experience – Harness customer data and discover actionable insights and next best actions.

Intelligent Customer Experience aims to aggregate information from a wide variety of internal sources and unify data into a single repository. Augmented by external and third-party sources, AI, and machine learning, you can use this repository to gain predictive insights and next best action guidance. It also adds dimensions to customer data so to enable better analysis.

No-Touch Information Management – Spend less time entering and finding data and more time on high value work.

The No-Touch Information Management design philosophy allows you to automate the collection, processing, and presentation of customer information as a byproduct of the user activity (i.e. engaging with customers, using other tools and systems, etc.). This design delivers customer data directly to users in real-time context of what they’re doing, what tools they’re using, and what key insights they need.

Continuous Cloud Innovation – Trust in the most modern, durable, and future-proof CX platform on the market.

Delivered as a native AWS application, Sugar’s cloud products leverage more capabilities than any other CX offering. AWS supports the world’s largest e-commerce marketplace that owns nearly half of the entire US market, has five times more cloud infrastructure than their next 14 competitors combined, and complies with 34 different security and compliance standards. This means that Sugar and their customers always have access to the most advanced, secure, scalable, and reliable infrastructure technology available.

Sugar’s New Products

In an effort prioritize customer experience, Sugar’s new products provide offer flexible deployment and customization options. In addition to existing cloud and on-premise CRM platforms, Sugar’s new products are:

Sugar Market – The new all-in-one marketing automation cloud solution designed to supercharge marketing efficiency and productivity.

Sugar Sell – The new-and-improved award-winning sales automation cloud solution renowned for its intuitive user interface, extensibility, and customer satisfaction.

Sugar Serve – The new customer engagement center cloud solution designed to streamline case management and issue resolution.

Sugar will also offer add-on products such as Hint Insight, Customer Journey Plug-In, Collabspot, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and Oktopost. Third-party extensions will still be available through SugarExchange.

Sugar’s New Features

Sugar has developed platform features to enhance each of their new products:

Cloud Insights – Provides on-demand access to administrative controls and information over the cloud environment, such as database and file system storage, license usage and expiration, and error and access logs.

SugarIdentity – Provides federated identity and comprehensive single sign on across Sugar’s applications and services, helping customers securely manage user identities and access to applications and services in the Sugar ecosystem.

Tile View – Provides a pivot table-like organizational structure to the opportunity pipeline, including managing opportunities by sales stage and expected close date.

Mobile Enhancements – Provides drill-down insights, enhanced collaboration, and a better quoting experiences for multiple currencies.

SugarBPM Advanced Email Handling – Monitors and triggers email-based actions within a workflow and allows setting “From” and “Reply-To” email addresses in automated emails.

What You, the Customer, Need to Know

For existing customers:

• Sugar’s product portfolio is very much the same. Sugar Pro and Enterprise, for both cloud and on-premise, will continue as supported product offerings. Sugar will continue to issue regular updates and releases with bug fixes and enhancements. If you wish to purchase more user seats for your existing Pro/Enterprise instance, you can still do that.
• Although you’re not being forced to migrate from your existing instance, you do not get Sugar Market, Sell, and Serve for free with these new releases. These are new offerings and are not bundled with Sugar Pro/Enterprise.
• At renewal, your Sugar Partner sales or Sugar sales representative can help you choose your best option going forward. One option will be to renew on the product you are already using, but you may also have the option to migrate to one of our other offerings if it makes sense for your situation.

For new customers:

• Sugar Pro/Enterprise are still available for purchase, but they are now on-prem only solutions. Customers that need cloud solutions will be directed to Sugar Market, Sell, and Serve.
• For more information or pricing about Sugar Market, Sell, and Serve, contact us and we’ll chat about your business challenges and technology needs!

Looking to the Future

This concludes our update. We’ll leave you with a message from the CEO, Craig Charlton, taken from his open letter to partners and customers about the new SugarCRM:

“…We are going to lead and drive success on many levels with these changes. And then? We’ll repeat the process. That’s our promise to you – we’ll never stop improving on the tools and services that make technology not only useful, but vital to your business. Calling the New Sugar a 360-degree customer view is to sell it short, to be blunt. It’s much more than that.”