I had the pleasure of attending my first SugarCon on behalf of Constellation Research in San Francisco June 14-15. SugarCon is SugarCRM’s annual Customer and Developers conference and according to SugarCRM, this year’s event attracted over 1200 registrations with attendees from over 20 countries.
The top product announcements at the event:
- Sugar Intelligent Services - Read press release
- Customer Journey Plugin - Read press release
Top 3 Takeaways Slide:
My Summary:
- Growth in both global and enterprise customers - Sugar’s growth in the enterprise market these past few years has been impressive. The addition of several marquee brand customers in diverse industries and geos demonstrates product, user and global scalability. Example with customer Sands China leveraging Sugar to manage loyalty programs to boost room occupancy.
- Product innovation to power productivity - New product announcements included a “Customer Journey Plugin”, a first I’ve seen built natively in CRM. The demo showed an easy to utilize UI with minimal clicks to add contacts into a pre-configured journey. This feature has much potential for Marketing/Sales collaboration, and I’ll be keeping my eye on this one to look at customer use cases on it’s effectiveness and to see how this intersects with sales stages. Sugar’s also on the AI and machine-learning track now with the announcement of “Sugar Intelligent Services”. An AI assistant, Candace, promises to help sales cut data entry time and suggest next steps to take. I’ll also look into customer use cases to review.
- Company focused on CRM and not multiple Cloud extensions - Sugar’s singular focus on CRM has allowed them to innovate the core solution faster without the distraction of extending into adjacent markets such as marketing, e-commerce, etc. This is positive news for Sugar customers on a best of breed tech stack.
For SugarCRM Customers and Prospects:
From the customer sessions at SugarCon, I got a great sense of how SugarCRM’s customization capabilities allow you to make CRM work the way you work. Customizable dashlets allow companies to customize by industry, role, user, etc. Case studies with Sands China and Unifin showed 2 different usage scenarios in regulated industries with customizations for loyalty programs (Sands) and loan management (Unifin). The product flexibility and extensibility is there, but be mindful of implementation and integration services costs. The more advanced workflow capabilities are on version 7.6 and up, so plan your upgrade path to take advantage of the new features. Conversations with Sugar’s executive team have reinforced their commitment to focusing on CRM and not other adjacent markets, which will enable them to continue innovating the core solution. If you’re a SugarCRM prospect, solid customer sat and new product innovation make them a strong contender to evaluate.
See my tweets and product screenshots from SugarCon on Storify:
