Over the years, I've done several Salesforce automation vendor evaluations. So, when it was time to do this for my current company, I've quickly rounded up the usual SFA suspects, narrowed down the options, ran a pilot with the sales team in-house and settled on a vendor. Cake, right? Sure, but here's something that I've realized in the process about SugarCRM, one the the vendors.
There has been a lot of buzz around SugarCRM in the recent years. They have open-source roots, low per seat licensing fees when compared to other competitors i.e. Salesforce, and robust functionality with pretty dashboards & sales pipelines that are sure to dazzle most executives.
The following are some of the issues that had made an impact on the decision making process for SugarCRM:
1. SugarCRM evaluation server is a shared environment. Things were slow most of the time with frequent timeouts. Times are tough but if sugar is trying to win over business they can't let the server performance get in the way.
2. SugarCRM's recent releases are unpolished and not fully QA'd. We've tried to import contact records and either got SQL errors or blank screens. SugarCRM's sales engineers have told us that there is "a problem with the data" and didn't have a good explanation for why their software doesn't handle errors gracefully.
3. Technically, SugarCRM Open Source edition is free but we really needed to use the on-demand version to avoid hosting yet another system. SugarCRM's on-demand hosting pricing model is too rigid for most SMBs due to a one year contract lock in where a business has to commit to thousands of dollars.
Using virtualization, it shouldn't cost SugarCRM much to maintain on-demand hosting profiles for customers with month-to-month pricing which would open the doors for a much bigger number of customers who don't want to commit for the whole year. The important thing is that once customers import data and build on that by generating extra data they are usually hooked and will renew their contracts. Again, SugarCRM could just outsource hosting altogether by putting the whole thing into a could which shouldn't cost them much.
SugarCRM needs to be more more competitive, especially in this market. Hope they'll catch on before it's too late.
