SugarCRM 5 Pulling Against Closed Source CRM
The multi-billion-dollar market for CRM software is hotly
contested by closed source vendors like SAP, Oracle and
Salesforce.com among others, all of whom spend tens of
millions of dollars marketing their wares.
Can open source compete? John Roberts, CEO of open source CRM vendor SugarCRM, has
been out to prove that it can for the past four years and is upping the ante with Sugar 5.0.
“We’re a pull model and the Web is pulling us, whereas 99
percent of CRM vendors are push,” Roberts told
internetnews.com. “We’re not afraid of any
commercial CRM vendor.”
Roberts’ bravado comes in part from his enthusiasm for Sugar 5.0, which expands customization
capabilities, includes an embedded e-mail system and boasts
a new on-demand architecture.
For SugarCRM, open source isn’t just a marketing angle,
it’s also how they decide where to enhance the technology.
Roberts explained that the requirement of having embedded
e-mail inside of the CRM came from the open source users.
Rather than starting from scratch, SugarCRM makes use of
Yahoo’s open source e-mail libraries for nearly half of the
embedded e-mail clients code base.
Though Sugar 5.0 will have embedded e-mail, it is intended
to be an e-mail client as opposed to a full fledged e-mail
collaboration server.
It’s also expected to be easier to build
add-on modules for Sugar 5.0. Roberts explained that since
the Sugar 4.5 release last year, the platform has had a
module framework, but to do complex things you’d have to be a developer.
The new module builder in Sugar 5.0 is a do-it-yourself
simplified mechanism for users to build or customize their
own CRM module. Newly built modules can then be shared with
other Sugar users on the SugarForge repository, which, together with SugarExchange, is
SugarCRM’s open source answer to Salesforce.com
AppExchange.
The open source community might also be further boosted
with the Sugar 5.0 release since it will be the first
Sugar release under the GPL version 3 license. All
previous versions of Sugar had been provided under
SugarCRM’s Mozilla Public License Plus Attribution, which
is not an official Open Source Initiative (OSI)-approved
license.
Last month Roberts announced his intention to move Sugar to the new GPL, which also includes
an attribution clause. Attribution means a
“powered by” notation in the program is included.
Roberts has been at odds for years with the OSI over licensing and recently bumped heads with an OSI official at LinuxWorld over whether open source licensing actually matters.
“It’s quite a sizable project to embed the GPLv3
licensing in your code base,” Roberts said. “We’ve been
working with the FSF [Free Software Foundation] to make
sure we’ve done it correctly.”
Though Roberts has chosen GPLv3 for his open source
license, he doesn’t expect the new license to put him at
odds with Microsoft.
In early 2006, SugarCRM signed a deal with Microsoft enabling the open source CRM to run on Windows.
As part of that deal Sugar was set
to be released under a Microsoft Shared Source License.
Sugar 5.0 will not be available under a Microsoft Shared
Source license.
“Nothing has changed in the relationship with Microsoft,”
Roberts said. “We still have our weekly calls with them.”
He explained that Sugar still has complete support on
Microsoft platforms and, though Sugar will not be using a
Microsoft Shared Source license, he praised Microsoft for
its clear and legible licensing terms.
The Sugar 5.0 release comes more than a year after the 4.5
release and marks the longest release cycle yet for
SugarCRM. Between version 4 and 4.5, as was the case with previous versions, the
release cycle had only been roughly every six months.
The reason for the delay with version 5? SugarCRM was
aiming for perfection. Roberts noted that the internal
code name for the 5.0 release at SugarCRM was
“Perfection.”
“We’re at the level that it just takes longer since the
application is bigger deeper and richer,” Roberts said.
“It’s all part of our evolution of the engineering
release cycle.”
A beta community preview release of Sugar 5.0 is expected
to be available this week with full general availability
expected by the end of September.
Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.
