SugarCRM lands $20 million venture round
34683
SugarCRM lands a $20 million venture round, giving the open source customer relationship management software maker a boost to its global expansion plans.
201412
After a year of pilots and trials, Siebel Systems jumped with both feet into the SMB market Tuesday, announcing a new approach to offer Siebel Professional CRM applications to SMBs (small and midsize businesses) -- companies with revenues up to about $500 million.
328338
Company is looking to attract more business process experts to use its software through the establishment of specific community site tailored to their needs.
96792
The two companies are targeting customers that have invested in a services-oriented architecture.
475541
A company claims that the OLPC Association infringued a patent on a keyboard and is asking for $20 to settle the case.
377827
Eurekster, Inc., which wasone of the first community based social search engines, has secured $5.5 million in a Series B financing. The funding, from Technology Venture Partners (TVP) of Australia and Transcosmos Investments of Japan with the participation of the private investors who provided the company&#8217;s initial Series A financing, will enable Eurekster to accelerate [...]
593550
New pay-per-call paid-search engine model has potential for luring new ad business.
645823
A company that could put the va-va-voom in your portfolio this Valentine's Day.
552761
In deciding to buy MySQL last month, Sun was attracted to the open-source database company's very rapid growth rate and its revenue model, Sun President/CEO Jonathan Schwartz said in a keynote presentation Wednesday at SugarCRM's SugarCon 2008 conference in San Jose, Calif.MySQL was driving real value, innovation, and choice, Schwartz said. Sun agreed to buy the company in a $1 billion deal."What was attractive was how profound their distribution was," Schwartz said. MySQL offers access to about 11 million deployments around the world, and Sun began to see MySQL delivering real value, innovation, and choice, he said. MySQL sells services and support for its database.Asked if Sun planned to scale the MySQL database to compete with Oracle, Schwartz said Sun will not compete with Oracle but "will scale MySQL to extraordinary heights."The future lies in open source, innovation, and freedom of choice, according to Schwartz. Open source, he said, represents choice for CIOs. Developers, meanwhile, are making decisions about what runs in data centers, something that used to be the sole domain of the CIO, said Schwartz.Schwartz also stressed the importance of communities. "With every mainstream asset at Sun, we're investing to create a community," of developers and users regardless of whether they pay any money, he said.Schwartz's being a keynote presenter at the conference presents a bit of irony in that the open-source Sugar CRM package is written in PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) rather than the Java language created and promoted by Sun. But Schwartz noted the Java Virtual Machine is being expanded to accommodate other languages. The JVM enables Java applications to run on platforms supporting the JVM."I think what you'll see from Sun is that we're just going to take the J off the JVM and just make it a VM," Schwartz said. He cited Sun's Da Vinci Machine project, which is an effort to expand language coverage of the JVM.In other developments at the conference, SugarCRM laid out a roadmap of Sugar product releases planned for 2008.Due in April or May, the 5.1 edition of Sugar focuses on SMBs. It will feature improvements in reporting, including about 20 pre-canned reports, as well as a new systems management console via the company's DCE (Data Center Edition) 1.0.Wireless and tracker enhancements also are planned. The tracker will be able to tell who and how many users are online. Also, it will reveal the CRM usage level for a particular team and what modules are being used the most.The 5.2 edition, expected in July, is to feature real-time and global grid capabilities.Sugar 6.0, due in December, will be geared to large enterprises. Included will be portal-enabled partner relationship management and a new calendar with an AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) UI and a recurring meeting capability. Users also can create Web services-based mashups.A Java layer in version 6.0 will link Sugar to other applications, such as the Lucene search engine. DCE 2.0 will debut with advanced resource and systems management.In a morning keynote presentation, SugarCRM co-founder and CEO John Roberts touted a new era in "commercial open source.""We are at the end of the beginning in commercial open source these last four years, and open source is clearly in the mainstream now," Roberts said.SugarCRM founders in 2003 started questioning the proprietary lock-in of software, he said. They left their jobs in 2004 and began SugarCRM, Roberts recalled."We founded [the] Sugar open-source project before we even incorporated the company," Roberts said. The founders, who also include Clint Oram and Jacob Taylor, decided to post code in an effort to write software in a public venue, said Roberts.Roberts cited five forces shaping technology: ideas, willpower and the Internet; belief in the intelligence of crowds, consumerization of IT, cloud computing, and the global language of sharing. "It's exciting, and for me, it's clear that this journey we started on four years ago is real and there really isn't any stopping it," said Roberts. "The best thing I like about it is its focus on innovation," he added.A user of SugarCRM, Eddie White, director of Mania Technologie UK, which makes manufacturing equipment, uses the product as a database for marketing, customer care, and field service support."The investment was very cost-effective in terms of overall license costs," White said."We've been able to create a global database of customers and contacts," he said.Mania is looking to integrate its Sugar installation with its other systems, such as stock control and sales order management systems, White said.The biggest hurdle to deploying Sugar has been getting users to embrace it who had been used to doing things another way, according to White. "It's been easy to use; it's just a question of getting people to change their work practice," he said.While Mania did examine the source code of SugarCRM when doing administrative-level customization, it did not make any changes to the code. The company may do this when it expands use of the product for customer care.SugarCRM announced on Wednesday stack installers that provide a simplified, wizard-based installation for Sugar Community Edition for Solaris and OpenSolaris.
225271
(InfoWorld) - As SugarCRM readies the final version of its Sugar 5.0 commercial and open source customer relationship management software, the vendor is planning a new platform edition of the software for developers. Sugar 5.0 is one of the most significant releases from the open source startup since its founding in 2004, according to John Roberts, SugarCRM's CEO. Around 40 engineers at the 125-person company have been working on the release for the past 18 months, he said. Looking ahead, the vendor plans to also package Sugar as a development platform probably under the product name Sugar Developer edition. "Sugar has always been a platform," Roberts said. As well as traditional CRM functionality, third-party developers have already created other capabilities based on Sugar, including financial and human resources management modules. SugarCRM unveiled the beta release of Sugar 5.0 on Monday, with the final version of the software due out toward the end of September. As with other Sugar releases, the new version comes in three editions: one open source and the other two commercial releases for which the vendor charges for additional functionality and technical support. Formerly known as Sugar Open Source, the free edition of the software changes its name to Sugar Community Edition with the debut of release 5.0. Another difference is thatÂ SCE 5.0 will be licensed under version 3 of the GNU general public license (GPLv3)Â instead of the vendor's own Sugar Public License, a derivation of the Mozilla Public License, as had previously been the case. As before, users can deploy the commercial editions, Professional and Enterprise, in a variety of ways, including on-site and on-demand along with appliance and stack versions. Customers can move between on-site and on-demand versions of Sugar as they choose, Roberts said. In Sugar 5.0, the vendor has written a new on-demand architecture for the hosted versions of its software. The architecture is multi-instance, meaning that each customer receives their own instance of the CRM software instead of all customers sharing the same instance of the software, often known as multitenancy. The new release also gives users the ability to build custom modules and share them across their Sugar deployments. SugarCRM hopes that the new architecture will let the company compete more aggressively with current and future on-demand CRM rivals, especially market pioneer Salesforce.com. While both Oracle and SAP already provide hosted versions of their CRM software, Microsoft is preparing to roll out its Dynamics CRM Live service later this year. SAP is also planning an on-demand applications suite, code-named A1S, which includes CRM functionality and is due out early in 2008. SugarCRM has been in the on-demand market for over two years, and 40 percent of the vendor's 2,000 paying customers have opted for that deployment, Roberts said. Like other commercial open source startups, including database vendor MySQL, SugarCRM harbors ambitions of some day becoming a $1 billion enterprise player. "We've always believed we can be a large enterprise public company," Roberts said, pointing that the CRM market has plenty of room for growth since many companies have yet to invest in the software. SugarCRM is looking to go public in 2008 or 2009, he added. SugarCRM is already widening its global horizons and is in the process of opening an office in Beijing, Roberts said. To support its on-demand operations,Â SugarCRM will open a new datacenter in Europe later this year. Sugar 5.1 is due out in December and version 5.5 will likely appear in mid-2008, Roberts said. SugarCRM plans to incorporate more Web 2.0 collaborative capabilities in its CRM software such as wikis, real-time chat, and desktop sharing.
643352
SugarCRM has released the 5.0 version of its open-source customer relationship management software following a long period of development and testing.
647006
The search for 20% annualized returns starts now.
559431
(InfoWorld) - A venture capital firm has given a $10 million boost to a Swedish company that could soon be in the competitive crosshairs of Google and Microsoft. Swedish venture company Northzone Ventures will help Xcerion AB emerge from stealth mode to launch its Web-based OS and related marketplace for hosted software later this year, said Xcerion CEO Daniel Arthursson, in an interview with the IDG News Service Monday. The company already has some big-name investors backing it, including one of the original architects of Windows NT and a former Microsoft general manager, Lou Perazzoli, and former Microsoft CFO John Connors. Arthursson said Xcerion, which was formed in 2001, set up an office in Seattle two years ago, and company founders began networking in the area to gain the support of the former Microsoft executives. Xcerion has developed an OS that works from within a browser, which developers can use to build Web-based versions of existing software or new applications quickly and without having to build separate versions for different computer OSes, he said. The company also will host the applications and make them available in an online marketplace. Users can choose to either run ad-supported versions of the applications for free, or pay a small yearly fee -- about $5 or $10 per year -- to run them is ad-free, Arthursson said. The company will manage subscriptions for third-party vendors and give them about 80 percent or 90 percent of the subscription revenue, while keeping a small percentage for its hosting and management services, he said. "If you [look at] the current marketplace, there are probably only about 50 to 300 applications that are the main ones people use today on their desktop computers," he said. "If you can recreate these and use it within our own OS, people won't have to use those applications on the desktop and can stop buying licensed software." Users also can run applications built on Xcerion's XML Internet OS when they are offline, Arthursson said. Any information saved when they are running the application offline will be immediately updated to the online version when they reconnect to the Internet. Xcerion is hoping to do for Web-based business application development what Microsoft did for applications development on the desktop, Arthursson said. "In some sense, we're working in the same direction [as Microsoft]," he said. Google also has promoted itself as a platform on which developers can build Web applications, but so far the company's services have not really caught on with consumers, not business customers. Arthursson said he hopes Xcerion will partner with many of Microsoft's ISV partners so they can offer versions of their software online. He said he expects ads sold for applications offered through Xcerion's marketplace will likely be the No. 1 source of revenue for the company, while subscription services managed for third-party applications will be its second biggest revenue stream. Microsoft, too, has been ramping up its strategy to offer Web-based applications. When Xcerion launches its Internet OS -- which is expected by the end of the third calendar quarter -- it also will launch its own Web-based office productivity suite that will run on the OS. The suite will include a word-processing application, a spreadsheet-application, a presentation application similar to Microsoft PowerPoint and an e-mail and calendar application, Arthursson said. The differentiator between Xcerion's productivity application and Google Apps from the search vendor is the ability for it to run when a user is offline, he said. Microsoft, too, is said to be developing a Web-based version of its Office suite, but has not officially made an announcement about the product.
693326
The database provider continues to buy its growth.
589943
As SugarCRM readies the final version of its Sugar 5.0 commercial and open source customer relationship management software, the vendor is planning a new platform edition of the software for developers.
712771
By Staunton, Martin  NITRO - Cable's Bagels has a certain ring to it, but the cofounder of the one of America's leading entertainment apparel manufacturers admits the cash register in the baking business probably would not ring to the tune of $20 million a year.
360006
Insurance claims resulting from hurricanes Charley and Frances are expected to generate as much as $20 million in revenue for Atlanta-based Crawford &amp; Co.