SugarCRM Previews Upcoming Sugar 7 Release, Offers Private Cloud Option

The company is holding its SugarCon 2013 conference for customers and partners in New York this week where the company also is expected to unveil a new release of its SugarCRM Mobile application for iOS devices and preview a mobile application for Android mobile devices.

The conference has close to 1,000 attendees, including about 350 channel partners. "Social, mobile, and cloud computing are fundamentally changing how people interact with their customers, and ultimately the nature of CRM," said Larry Augustin, SugarCRM CEO, in a statement.

[Related: SugarCRM Execs: Sales Reorg Aims To Increase 'Feet On The Street' ]

"The Sugar 7 solution departs from CRM software's traditional focus on internal management of the sales team. Sugar 7 focuses first on the needs of the user who interacts one-to-one with the customer. By leveraging a smart, fast, social customer engagement platform, every customer-facing professional across the enterprise knows their customer better, does their job better, and delivers a consistent, superior experience," the CEO said.

Sugar 7, expected to be generally available sometime this summer, will offer a new, embedded "intelligence panel" dashboard that provides a 360-degree view of business, online and social customer intelligence. That makes it possible to have all information about a customer on one screen when a sales representative is engaged with that customer, the company said. The dashboard can be customized for individual users.

The new release will sport an HTML5-based user interface that works across desktop and tablet computers and other mobile devices. And the application will more tightly integrate CRM capabilities with social media activity streams.

Sugar Private Cloud is a new deployment option that provides a dedicated, managed, private instance of the SugarCRM application. The locally hosted software offers higher service levels for businesses that want greater control over their data, security and resources and the ability to change management capabilities, according to the company.

SugarCRM already provides on-premise and software-as-a-service versions of its applications.

Wednesday SugarCRM will unveil a new release of its mobile client for iOS tablets and smartphones, and preview an edition of the software for Android devices. The new release, while based on HTML5, takes advantage of some native iOS functionality such as the ability to upload photos, access contact directions and maps, and work with such features as "click-to-call."

The mobile app, which SugarCRM offers for free, is integrated with the browser-based Sugar application.

PUBLISHED APRIL 9, 2013