SugarCRM has debuted a low-cost, on-demand version of its popular open-source CRM application and has dropped prices on the on-demand versions of its Professional and Enterprise software.
The new Sugar Express, priced at less than $10 per user per month, is targeted toward small businesses, branch offices within larger companies and home offices, said Martin Schneider, product marketing director.
SugarCRM has long offered a free, open-source community version of its application, and Schneider said the number of downloads of that application has surged to between 60,000 to 70,000 every month -- up from between 30,000 to 40,000 a month a year ago -- thanks to the recession and businesses seeking ways to lower their IT costs.
But Schneider said many of those downloaded copies of SugarCRM aren't ever implemented because many small businesses don't have IT staff or dedicated servers to run such applications. "That's where we saw the disconnect," he said.
And that's the target market for the Sugar Express application the company has built on its Sugar Open Cloud Software-as-a-Service platform. The on-demand product provides core sales, marketing and support features, according to the company. It also includes the vendor's Module Builder toolset that customers and channel partners use to customize the application, and Cloud Connectors for integrating third-party data sources such as Hoover's and Jigsaw.
SugarCRM channel partners, which number around 200 worldwide, can host the Sugar Express software for their customers or leave the hosting to the vendor, Schneider said. Solution providers can develop customized, vertical-industry instances of the application and provide value-added services around it. "So they can get great margins and great economies of scale," he said. "We really see a huge upside for our partners."
Sugar Express is priced at $499 for an annual subscription for up to five users and at $799 for up to 10 users for a year.
SugarCRM also reduced the prices of the on-demand versions of its SugarCRM Professional and Enterprise software. SugarCRM Professional is now priced at $30 per user per month, down from $40, while SugarCRM Enterprise is now priced at $50 per user per month, down from $75.
