GigaOM » SugarCRM

Open-source CRM player SugarCRM talks up IPO

Barb Darrow — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 15:28:25 +0000

Striking while the iron’s hot, SugarCRM is weighing an IPO for next year. The news comes just weeks after Workday, another enterprise software vendor, executed a hugely successful public offering. That’s an indication that the bloom is back on the IPO rose for companies offering their business software as a service. That Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model was pioneered by Salesforce.com, a much larger rival to SugarCRM.

SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin said the company’s goal is to be a public company and “there’s a chance we can get there in 2013,” according to Bloomberg.com.

Despite signs that enterprise SaaS is the place to be — Workday’ share blew past expectations on its October 12 launch — Augustin signaled the need to proceed with caution. He’s been burnt before.

As Bloomberg pointed out, Augustin was CEO of VA Linux, another open-source oriented company, which went public in 1999, and quickly saw its market cap spike at $15 billion based on sales of $12 million to $15 million, and then crater in the dot.com bust. The company unwound over the years becoming SourceForge, then GeekNet. What was left was acquired in September by Dice Holdings.

As Augustin told Bloomberg West TV: “There are lots of lessons from that. You saw that valuation come down very quickly.”

SugarCRM claims customers including Coca Cola Enterprise and ThyssenKrupp System Engineering, the State of Oregon and Men’s Wearhouse (which Salesforce.com also claims as a customer).

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New challenges for the IT organization

Dow Brook Advisory Services — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 15:38:23 +0000

Cloud computing, mobile computing and the consumerization of IT are combining to create another force that is overwhelming many IT departments: complexity. This report, the second in a three-part series, examines several types of complexity in the business IT environment, including complexity of devices and applications, physical and virtual computing environments, and the related challenges for IT staff.

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Feb. 7, 2008: AOL, SugarCRM and RIAA Edition

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 16:13:13 +0000

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Is That Voice in Your App?

Om Malik — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 09:30:15 +0000

[qi:086] Things have been tough as of late for plain vanilla VoIP service providers, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that voice over IP is over as a technology. As my good friend Andy Abramson points out, the focus in the future is going to be on adding voice to apps.

This was one of the trends I talked about when the now-defunct Business 2.0 launched its Next Net series in 2006. The idea behind the series was that as broadband became all-pervasive, everything from the web to mobile to video to voice became part of the next evolution of the Internet. (It has been a guiding principle of my coverage here on GigaOM.)

Fonality was one of the companies we picked for the list, because even at the time, Chris Lyman, Fonality’s CEO, was talking about adding voice to apps. He made a key move today, acquiring Insightful, one of SugarCRM’s largest resellers. The new offering from Fonality, called FonalityCRM, integrates the CRM suite with PBX and offers click-to-call dialing, agent screen pops and several other features.

Others are also experimenting with similar VoIP-app mashups. Iperia, for example, is building an app for real estate agents. Ike Elliott , formerly of Level 3 (LVLT) points out that voice-data-applications have been around for a while, especially in call center applications.

However, as open-source telephony tools (such as Asterisk) become even more sophisticated, and the web 2.0 community finally comes to grips with the importance of voice, we are going to see some clever mashups come to the forefront. Companies like Lypp are making it relatively easy to add voice to web apps through their APIs.

The Lypp API enables rapid VoIP feature implementation, including: click-to-call and click-to-conference; virtual phone booth calling features; and the integration of basic and advanced telephony, such as embedded email and profile call links for Facebook, MySpace and other web-based applications and services.

Have you seen a VoIP-Web 2.0 mashup you like? Drop us a note, or leave a comment.

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