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SugarCRM on line one

, April 22, 2008 @ 4:06 am ET

Fair play to SugarCRM for landing a reseller deal with BT, the incumbent telephone services provider in the UK. According to the announcement, BT “will offer its 1.2 million business customers SugarCRM’s commercial software solutions” including both the Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise editions, in both on-premise or SaaS deployments. It’s deals like this that can really take open source software to the masses.

Of those 1.2 million business users I have no doubt that the majority are simply phone services customers, but you immediately begin to see how SugarCRM will fit in with BT’s web hosting and managed IT services.

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Comments (3) Categories: Software

3 Responses to “SugarCRM on line one”

  1. infoworld.com says:
    April 22, 2008 at 12:18 pm

    SugarCRM, NetSuite get boost from BT deal…

    BT said Tuesday it will sell enterprise software products from NetSuite and SugarCRM to its small and…

  2. Fred Steele says:
    May 1, 2008 at 1:34 pm

    I fail to see how SugarCRM is anything but a leech, taking advantage of open source contributions from programmers, and then taking all the money when they sell the product. It seems to me that to call yourself “open source” and then sell your products is contradictory, especially when Sugar CRM has been built by thousands of people who gave their time and ideas for free, and they get nothing.

    • Brian says:
      May 2, 2008 at 3:08 pm

      SugarCRM has an internal engineering team that builds and maintains the whole of the application. The “open source contributions from programmers” that you mention occurs more in the form of providing additional “eyes” to weed out bugs, as well as on SugarForge and SugarExchange where they can post and even sell their additions to Sugar. SugarCRM is a COMMERCIAL Open Source provider of CRM, which means that while they do have commercial aspirations, they still make an open source application available to all for free. Think of it more like a VAR taking an open source product, like MySQL, and adding their own bells and whistles to it, then repackaging it and selling it for a profit. Nobody would begrudge the VAR, but this is essentially what SugarCRM does–only, they are both the VAR and the open source provider rolled up into one.