SugarCRM Enables Best Practices in Social Business for Clients around the World with IBM Integrations

SugarCRM, the world’s fastest-growing customer relationship management (CRM) company, today announced enhanced technology integrations with IBM that enable organizations to leverage best practices for creating social businesses. In addition, SugarCRM announced that its customers, RealConnections and Virosafe are embracing the integrated technology to enhance collaboration and customer relationship management.

The ways businesses connect with colleagues, customers and partners changed significantly over the last year as more mid-to-large enterprises began adopting social business applications. According to IBM’s 2011 Tech Trends Report, “The majority of respondents reported that their organizations have embraced social business to some degree to benefit from increased efficiency and collaboration.”

“Every competitor is just one online search away from getting to your next customer, so sales teams need to be armed with the right tools that help them work more effectively,” said Clint Oram, CTO and co-founder of SugarCRM. “We believe IBM is a leader in social business and delivers a best-in-class technology platform for collaboration. By adding CRM to the mix, organizations have the ability to easily access and aggregate pertinent customer data from social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook so they can make more informed business decisions.”

Product Integrations

SugarCRM integrations with IBM expand the company’s breadth of offerings for social businesses, and new enhancements include:

1) SugarCRM on IBM DB2: Sugar now supports IBM DB2 database software on Linux, Unix and Windows systems. Support for DB2 provides users with industry-leading performance across multiple workloads, while lowering administration, storage, development, and server costs.

2) SugarCRM on IBM SmartCloud Enterprise: In October 2011, SugarCRM became the first and only CRM application to run on IBM SmartCloud Enterprise. The integration is designed to provide businesses across all industries greater visibility into sales, marketing and support to gain and retain customers while offering a scalable cloud infrastructure to grow as the business grows. SugarCRM will brand this deployment option as SugarCRM Private Cloud, Powered by IBM. As of today, SugarCRM Private Cloud, Powered by IBM is generally available through a select group of SugarCRM and IBM business partners.

SugarCRM Private Cloud users will benefit from the quality, reliability and security gained from IBM’s years of managing and operating data centers for enterprises and public institutions around the world. The SugarCRM platform is simple and easy to customize, providing the needed functionality for global deployments, including native language support for 25 languages. The combined solutions enable IBM and SugarCRM channel partners to easily create tailor-made xRM solutions for mid-market and enterprise customers at an affordable price point.

Social Business Customer Momentum Through iExtensions Acquisition

In April 2011, SugarCRM acquired iExtensions CRM from iEnterprises, Inc., the award-winning CRM solution built entirely for IBM collaborative technologies including IBM SmartCloud for Social Business, IBM Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino. The acquisition further extends SugarCRM’s product portfolio for IBM customers who have the goal of becoming social businesses.

Erik Vos, founder and co-owner of RealConnections, a cloud services aggregator and IT consulting company, said, “By moving from Salesforce.com to SugarCRM, we have realized immediate cost benefits as well as improved ease of use and ease of integrations with social business applications, like IBM’s SmartCloud for Social Business. As a result of the integration with IBM SmartCloud for Social Business, we have improved collaboration with employees and customers and have greater visibility into opportunity management. Overall data quality, CRM functionality and reliability have improved significantly.”

Another customer, Steinar L. Eriksson, CEO, of IT security company, Virosafe, said, “The SugarCRM integration with IBM SmartCloud for Social Business enables us to start online meetings with customers in just a few clicks and run presentations directly from the system. The implementation was quick and easy. And since both solutions are in the cloud, we can sell anytime, anywhere.”

See all of these integrations on display at IBM Lotusphere in Orlando, Fla. from Jan. 16 - 19. The SugarCRM exhibit is located at pedestal 635.

About SugarCRM

SugarCRM makes CRM simple. As the world's fastest growing customer relationship management (CRM) company, SugarCRM applications have been downloaded more than ten million times and currently serve over 850,000 end users in 80 languages. Over 7,000 customers have chosen SugarCRM's On-Site and Cloud Computing services over proprietary alternatives. SugarCRM has been recognized for its customer success and product innovation by CRM Magazine, InfoWorld, Customer Interaction Solutions and Intelligent Enterprise. For more information, call (408) 454-6900 or 1 87 SUGARCRM toll-free in the US, email contact@sugarcrm.com, or visit http://www.sugarcrm.com.