Eventually, Gatewood expects SugarCRM to roll out to 200 Athenahealth employees, cutting the organization's licenses from 300 to 100. Gatewood's group has extensively modified SugarCRM to suit its needs and will be going live with its deployment later this month.
"We love open-source, and we have a sizable development team already. "We've gotten to a size where we need more control and tighter integration with our internal systems," Gatewood said. Waltham, Mass.-based Athenahealth has been using for four years, in which time Gatewood says the privately-held health care practice management firm grew from $2 million to $60 million a year in annual revenue. licenses in his organization with SugarCRM deployments. Chief Technology Officer Bob Gatewood is in the process of replacing several hundred Inc. A hosted version is available for $40 per user, per month.Īthenahealth Inc. Pricing for Sugar Professional starts at $239 per user, per year and drops with volume licensing. A commercial version, Sugar Professional, includes customer support and additional extensions, such as improved reporting and data security features. The software's development home is, where the source code can be downloaded for free. The company is backed by close to $8 million in venture capital funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Walden International.
Frustrated by what they saw as the inefficiency of the commercial software-development process, SugarCRM's creators felt an open-source model could build both better software and the foundation for a viable business, Roberts said. You sometimes come up with interesting things that you wouldn't traditionally think of, but that are really valuable."Ĭupertino, Calif.-based SugarCRM was founded in April 2004 by a group of developers that had worked together at CRM maker Epiphany Inc. "People don't always see that as CRM, but I think that's one of the great things about being an open-source company. "We started getting a lot of requests for the ability to manage internal projects," said SugarCRM CEO John Roberts.
The forthcoming update adds campaign management, e-mail marketing and forecasting components to the suite, along with tools for broader back-office administration such as project management and an employee directory. Sugar Suite 3.0 represents a significant advance for the young product, which publicly launched in September.
is preparing for release later this month a major upgrade to its open-source customer relationship management (CRM) system, a software package SugarCRM's founders hope will woo customers that would otherwise turn to more-expensive commercial CRM offerings.