How Sweet is Sugar?
November 29th, 2004 by Adam Cuothe
In his article on SugarCRM it seems Mr. Chalifour at The FOSS Evaluation Center gives us a pretty clear answer. He shows how products like GoldMine or Microsoft’s CRM bury Sugar on the functionality front, those with a sweet tooth shouldn’t give up, there’s more.
SugarCRM began by focusing on a few core areas, in particular, as an open source product it would be responding closely to the demands of its core user base. Often with open source projects, if there isn’t a high demand for specific functionality, namely if a client company doesn’t have reason to sponsor the development of that functionality or developers have not had reason to code it, that functionality won’t show up in the product. The converse is true as well, when the user community starts demanding a feature, it gets developed rather quickly. The latter point was made clear in SugarCRM’s practice.
All good points. Not only does the article give us the good with the bad, but it does it based on what a customer had in mind while buying the solution. What? Buying? Yes, this is an example of open source making cash-money! I wonder how many other companies will take this to heart? I wish more analyst firms could back up their points like this, with examples and analyses.
In any case I’ve got to say that it only makes sense, our poor sugardog is the underdog… they started up in early 2004, hardly much time to put something big and corporate ass-kicking together – but they seem to have their priorities in-line. I hope we get a chance to follow up with this.
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