SugarCRM has realsed a new version of thier product last week. The company's release includes Sugar Open Source, a free basic version, plus two commercial editions, Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise, which come in three delivery models -- hosted, as an appliance, and on-premise. The on-premise versions are available starting at $39.95 per user a month. The on-premise versions of Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise are available for $239 and $449 per user per year. The subscription pricing includes the source code, 12 months of application updates, installation assistance, global weekday e-mail-based technical support, trouble ticketing with patch and fix distributions. The company also offers the Sugar cube appliance, which is a standalone server with the complete CRM suite installed ready for deployment at the customer's site.

Changes in Version 4.0 are focused on business process automation, adding a new rules-based workflow engine, said SugarCRM co-founder John Roberts. "An administrator can define the rules without the need to do any programming," said Roberts.Also included is an enhanced campaign management system for automating outbound e-mail campaigns and inbound e-mail lead requests, with an extended reporting capability to create charts and dashboards on the fly. "You can build your own query and create your own report criteria or organize a dashboard that is most appropriate for your business users," said Roberts. Roberts called it a milestone release because he believes it is the first time that a commercial open source application can rival the long-standing commercial, proprietary applications. Roberts cited the use of a distributed development model as key to its power. "You get ideas coming from all different perspectives. It gives the software a certain [user] friendliness," said Roberts.

BZ Results, a $70 million digital marketing company to the auto industry. Rob Lackey, CTO at BZ Results, said that having access to the source code was critical in the software selection process."Being able to do integration and customization ourselves for our mission-critical applications, and being able to build our own Web services that connect to the CRM application was invaluable," said Lackey. After reviewing Siebel, Salesforce.com, and SugarCRM, BZ Results chose SugarCRM. The ease of integration with other systems was another deal maker.

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Prashanth RaiTag(s):OpenSource, SugarCRM