Open-source SugarCRM eyes stock market entry
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Blog: The open-source packaged application company, which is releasing the beta of a major product upgrade, is on track to go public, CEO says.
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A major facelift and a lot of great new functionality!  The Sugar Team is excited to bring you the 2.0 release.  As you can see, hiring a UI engineer has taken the application to a whole new level of usability and appeal.  Who else has a pink UI?  We're also pleased to bring you the Leads module and significant improvements to the Contact module with vCard support and a simplified way of entering a contact, account and appointment in the single "Create from Business Card" screen.   You can send us an email any time with your feedback at contact@sugarcrm.com.  Our goal continues to be to build the sales automation system that you have always wanted, so your input is vital.  Check out http://www.sugarcrm.com for more details on the latest product roadmap, support forums, detailed product information and much more.  We hope you find this a useful tool for building your business.  Enjoy!  The Sugar Team    -=Included Features=- An overview of the features in this release.   Leads New to 2.0, put standardized processes into practice to make sure all sales reps use the same, consistent lead qualification methodology. With the click of a button, quickly turn leads into opportunities. With the Sugar Sales Leads module, you can also easily manage rented lists and prospect data separate from your customer data.  Import and Export Import contacts and accounts from CSV (comma separated values) files.  Users can also easily export data from the system to CSV files.  Opportunities Sugar Sales provides a complete, yet easy-to-use Opportunities module.  From deal size to each contactâs role, from listing the competitors to tracking the lead source, sales reps can easily manage each sales opportunity to completion.    Accounts & Contacts With the Accounts & Contacts module, you can easily enter and update key account and contact information. Tracking and staying in touch with your customers is simply a click away.   Activity & Task Management Managing your customer interactions is at the heart of a sales automation application. Sugar Sales provides a simple and clean set of tools for quickly tracking tasks, phone calls, emails and meetings.   Notes & Attachments Easily keep notes on every contact, opportunity or account. New to v1.5, add file attachments to notes.    Home Screen  Focus on the right activities with a quick view of your top opportunities, pipeline, today's appointments and task list.  Dashboard  A picture is always worth a thousand words.  With the dashboard module, you can graphically view how your opportunities breakdown by sales stage or industry.  New to v1.5, you can customize the charts to display the data you want.  Administration  Easily manage all the users in the system, their passwords, user interface themes and more.    -=Future Planned Features=- What we're working on next.   Internationalization  Support for local and localized date and time display.   Accounts & Contacts Easily sync customer contact information between Sugar Sales and MS Outlook and Palm devices.   Activity & Task Management Plug-ins for PDAs and email applications that deliver a best-in-class open source solution for tracking key customer information in your PDA quickly and easily.  Notes & Attachments Ability to enter HTML notes. Also provide for full-text searching across text or HTML notes as well as most file attachments.  Dashboard  More dashboard charts including the ability to customize the charts by time ranges, deal size and more.   The latest release can be found here: https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=107819&package_id=116411
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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.
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SugarCRM plans modesty layer SugarCon 2008 SugarCRM, one of the open source community's darlings, is taking steps towards improve interoperability between its PHP architecture and Java.â¦
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SugarCRM lands a $20 million venture round, giving the open source customer relationship management software maker a boost to its global expansion plans.
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The day when stock investors scan corporate results with computer software to make immediate buy-and-sell decisions may be close at hand.
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An upstart website aims to hook you with commission-free trading.
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A little shopping around can yield lots of free stock research.
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A dot-com services upstart gets ready to go public at a time when the market has cooled on new issues.
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ERP and CRM suite, including eCommerce, inventory, warehouse, order, customer management, general ledger, MRP, POS. Database independent service-oriented architecture (SOA).   The opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM application suite released version 1.0.0 Preview 6 today. There have been over 500 commits since the release of Preview 6 at the end of September. Significant enhancements include:   * Upgraded Pentaho component to the new 1.6 version * Live documentation is now available from opentaps application pages to the opentaps documentation site at http://www.opentaps.org/docs * Amazon.com product, inventory, and order integration now ready for beta-testing * Google Checkout support  * Support for credit card security code in online store and internal order entry * CRM activity and cases security enhancements: highlighting of new cases and activities and security settings to make activities private * Significantly enhanced Material Resources Planning (MRP)  * Support for third party warehouse inventory, such as those held in backup or supplier warehouses * Support for UPS pickup call tags * Improvements to built-in reporting capabilities, with better support for JasperReports, charting, and Excel files. * Other improvements throughout the application.    As opentaps 1.0.0 is still under active development, all users and developers should use subversion's svn update to stay up to date.     opentaps is an open source Java ERP and CRM system which is compatible with Windows and Linux and all major databases, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and MS SQL Server. opentaps can be downloaded from SourceForge.net at:    http://sourceforge.net/project/platformdownload.php?group_id=145855
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Hosted CRM company introduces a new framework for linking analysis tools to its applications.Image: Salesforce dashboard
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InfoWorld - SugarCRM has released the 5.0 version of its open-source customer relationship management software following a long period of development and testing.
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Company seeks to bolster its ability to offer business intelligence applications through a Web browser.
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Looking to get started with stocks? Look no further.
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Blog: Salesforce.com, SugarCRM find bones to pick with Microsoft's depiction of its hosted Live CRM plans.
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You don't have to be Google to challenge the way Wall Street manages initial public offerings. A little southwest Virginia biotechnology company has just gone public using the same innovative "open IPO" process as Google.
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Investor's Business Daily - Some free open-source software aside, business software has been sold through licensing agreements for packaged products or via Web-based subscriptions -- until now.