Sugarcrm Has Also Been Tested With The Zend Performance Suite

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a mature and cost-effective endeavor, but CRM applications can be expensive to buy or rent. Such applications are not costly to build but because of the costs required to market and sell, they eventually become expensive. However, SugarCRM, an open source software, is comprehensive, cost-effective and easy to use. The SugarCRM project was started by three CRM professionals with more than 20 years of experience spanning marketing, application design, and the engineering of commercial CRM applications.

John Roberts, Clint Oram and Jacob Taylor, after resigning from their respective jobs in product management and engineering at E.piphany Inc., decided to fund the SugarCRM project from their own pockets.

SugarCRM basically caters to three kinds of establishments; small companies that do not have a CRM system but are using other Open Source apps/infrastructure, such as Mambo, PHP, MySQL, OSCommerce, Linux, etc. Medium-sized companies that are using older closed source, proprietary CRM applications such as GoldMine, SalesLogix, salesforce.com, Act!, etc. Medium-sized companies with internal IT developers who are looking for a solid Open Source application stack that they can fully customize to meet their unique organizations CRM needs.

Most of Sugar’s development takes place on laptops running Windows. Several people develop it directly on Red Hat and one person executing it on a Mac. Tests are conducted on several instances and configurations of Red Hat, with Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Firebird, and Konquerer. SugarCRM has also been tested with the Zend Performance Suite. It is found that the PHP environment is really portable and does not have many issues reported due to differences between operating systems. For debugging, code analysis, and profiling, the built in PHP features and the Zend IDE is utilized. SugarCRM also supports multiple operating systems and cloud platforms and a variety of mobile devices, including Apple’s iPad, and applications such as Microsoft Office. This gives SugarCRM an edge over its competitors.

SugarCRM is well on the road to become the elixir of Customer Relationship Management. This is due to the fact that both developers and end users are seeing tangible results from their Sugar Sales deployments. Users have also adored SuagrCRM’s functionality, user interface, and the modular architecture that it is built on. With its on-site and on-demand PHP application, SugarCRM was considered a model start-up and held up as an example of cloud computing by Sun Microsystems' chief executive Jonathan Schwartz who frequently appeared at SugarCRM events as a keynote speaker.