How'd this get started?:
John Roberts: We started SugarCRM in April of 2004 after resigning from our jobs in
product management and engineering at E.piphany Inc. All three of us decided
that if SugarCRM was to be a successful project we would need to work on it
full-time, and fund development out of our own pockets initially.
What do you think are its best features?
We believe that user adoption is the most important element of successful
CRM systems. From the beginning we designed Sugar as friendly, fast and
powerful tool. We also think it's important that the application be somewhat
entertaining for reps to use.
What is cooking for future releases?
We ship new releases about every four to five months. For Sugar 3.5 to ship
in early August we are focusing on modularity. This will allow the
sugarforge.org developer community to more easily share functional
components.
What do you consider its biggest challenger?
Salesforce.com - proprietary software vendors who have tens of millions of
dollars to burn on sales and marketing expenditures but who spend very
little on software engineering themselves.
