SugarCRM is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution vendor.

History
SugarCRM was founded in 2004 by John Roberts, Clint Oram and Jacob Taylor. The company began as an open source project on Sourceforge in April 2004. By September 2004, Sugar Open Source had been downloaded 25,000 times. In October 2004, the company was named "Project of the Month" on Sourceforge [1]. The popularity of the project allowed the company to raise $26 million of venture capital from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Walden International, and New Enterprise Associates [2]. SugarCRM currently employs over 100 people [3]. Sugar Open Source has been downloaded over 3,000,000 times [4] and the project remains one of the most active on SourceForge.

Origins
The company operates a number of web sites, including its commercial web site SugarCRM.com [5], a development web site SugarForge.org, [6], Sugar Exchange [7], a destination for purchasing third-party extensions, and user forums [8].

Websites
Between 2004 and 2006 their customer base increased from 50 customers to over 1,200. SugarCRM is being used by several large customers, such as Honeywell, Yahoo!, Starbucks, State of Oregon, NASA Ames Research, AXA Rosenberg, First Federal Bank and BDO Seidman.

Customers

Products
SugarCRM develops CRM software in three versions: Sugar Open Source, Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise. (The use of the term "open source" is controversial; see License.) Each product is produced from the same code tree with Sugar Open Source containing roughly 85 percent of the functionality contained in Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise. The products are based on the LAMP stack of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Their functionality includes sales force automation, marketing campaigns, customer cases, collaboration and reporting. Sugar Open Source is free of charge; Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise are sold at an annual subscription.

Deployment Types
SugarCRM has over 150 business partners. There are also third party companies that have taken the open source version of the product, and made it the base for its own product, modifying the standard modules that come originally in SugarCRM, and adding new ones, related or not to the core CRM functionality. Some have taken the CRM core and expanded it, while some other companies just provide hosted access and support to the Open Source version of the product.

License

Web application
Vtiger CRM, an open source fork of SugarCRM