SugarCRM has announced the acquisition of Salesfusion, a mid-market marketing automation solution. The company described their plans to integrate Salesfusion with the SugarCRM platform in a press release this morning. Salesfusion is the second acquisition the company has made in less than three months. In March 2019, the company acquired Collabspot’s email integration products to enhance its email integration capabilities and take another step towards Sugar’s vision to deliver the most intuitive and collaborative user experience while eliminating data entry.

Craig Charlton, CEO of SugarCRM is quoted throughout the announcement.

“Modern companies expect more than just technology solutions,” said Charlton. “They want a personal relationship with the companies where they conduct business. With Salesfusion, we’re taking our market-leading CRM to the next level, harnessing Salesfusion’s advanced marketing automation capabilities to streamline campaign management, drive personalized engagement, improve conversion and transform customer experience throughout the customer journey. Together, we’re enabling marketing, sales and service professionals to be more productive, take action on customer insights and focus on high-impact value-added offerings that create relentlessly relevant customer experiences.”

As a longtime partner of both companies, BrainSell is very excited about this union. Consensus from the leadership team is that Sugar will become an even more dynamic solution. They predict that this merge is the first of many steps forward in the evolution of SugarCRM from a best-of-breed CRM and sales platform into a fully-integrated all-in-one suite solution to meet all business software needs. 

“To say that I’m excited would be an understatement,” said Jim Ward, CEO of BrainSell. “This is big. SugarCRM could easily become a major player in the software space and CRM industry. I have no doubt they will.”  

SugarCRM is not the first software or technology company to move away from the best-of-breed model to the all-in-one model. Salesforce.com has been steadily developing marketing automation and business intelligence functionality for its CRM platform since the early 2010s. Adobe, a once-exclusive multimedia creation software company, recently acquired the popular marketing automation software solution Marketo to provide digital marketing and automation functionality.  

The best-of-breed model is traditionally easier and faster to develop, market, and service, but these benefits fall short when user data is siloed and difficult to work with or integration with outside products is poor – which are common problems with best-of-breed products. The all-in-one model can address these problems. 

Take Apple, for example. Apple’s all-in-one approach is the reason for their immense success and marketplace influence. What started off as just a computer hardware company is now one of the leading global hardware and software technology companies for computers, laptops, tablets, phones, music players, watches, televisions, and speaker systems. Although some products aren’t best for every customer, they buy them anyway for the benefits of seamless integration with other Apple products, the ease of access to centralized user data across all devices, and the continuous updates and maintenance of products.  

But best-of-breed products will remain important pillars in the software and technology community. The all-in-one model can result in bloated products with irrelevant functionality and might be too expensive or too generic to meet needs, depending on the customer. In this case, customer may prefer the a la carte method for selecting software and technologies and will stick with best-of-breed products. 

SugarCRM may be jumping on the all-in-one model bandwagon, but they haven’t lost touch with their best-of-breed roots. By all accounts, SugarCRM and Salesfusion are a sensible and organic union – both in terms of product functionality and company vision.  

“I’ve had no better relationships than with the SugarCRM and Salesfusion teams, even before the acquisition. Different products, but same goal – improving the lives and businesses of customers,” said Ward. “They’re like peanut butter and jelly.”