SugarCRM has announced new integrations with various
components of IBM's software portfolio,
including WebSphere, Lotus and Cognos.
At the SugarCon 2011
conference in San Francisco,
SugarCRM announced new solutions that enhance the ability for enterprises
around the world to conduct social business, gain deeper insight into their
data and achieve greater information flow inside their organizations.
The new software builds on the growing relationship between SugarCRM and IBM
to help organizations execute marketing programs, grow sales, retain customers
and create custom business applications.
Available as of April 5, SugarCRM's the new solutions include an
integration between SugarCRM and IBM
LotusLive, new connectors for IBM Cognos
Business Intelligence Suite and IBM
WebSphere Cast Iron for SugarCRM integration platform. The announcements were
made during SugarCon, SugarCRM's annual customer, partner and developer
conference.
"These new combined solutions and connectors to powerful IBM
solutions extend the existing relationship between SugarCRM and IBM,"
said Clint Oram, co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO)
at SugarCRM, in a statement. "As a member of IBM's
Global Alliance Portfolio, we are dedicated to providing compelling solutions
for enterprises around the world."
SugarCRM for LotusLive places social business capabilities into the hands of
SugarCRM users. By combining CRM and
collaboration capabilities including Web conferencing and document sharing
capabilities right inside the Sugar system, sales, marketing and support
professionals can better engage with their prospects and customers, thus
shortening sales cycles and increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty. The
integration can be leveraged by both SugarCRM and IBM
LotusLive customers.
"Social businesses are more engaged with their customers, partners and
colleagues," said Sean Poulley, vice president of the Social Business
Cloud at IBM and a keynote speaker at
SugarCon 2011. "The integration of SugarCRM and LotusLive allows deeper
levels of collaboration across company boundaries, making the process of
supporting your customers and building loyalty easier and more effective."
As part of the launch of SugarCRM for LotusLive, IBM
is offering SugarCRM users a 30-day, no-charge trial of LotusLive.
Moreover, the newly announced integration between IBM's
Cognos Business Intelligence Suite and SugarCRM will offer users of the
combined systems advanced reporting, analytics, dashboarding and scorecarding
around their CRM data. With the combined
solution, organizations can achieve greater insight into sales, marketing and
customer support activities, providing predictability into these critical business
segments, SugarCRM officials said.
In addition, SugarCRM officials said the best way to optimize a CRM
system is to populate it with rich data from legacy and other third-party
systems. WebSphere Cast Iron for SugarCRM makes integration easy, leveraging
standard Web services to create a seamless flow of data into and out of a
SugarCRM instance, the company said. And, with WebSphere Cast Iron for
SugarCRM, users can integrate cloud-based or on-premises solutions with Sugar
with the same ease and simplicity.
"Using IBM WebSphere Cast Iron
integration, SugarCRM users can now extract more value from their CRM
investment by getting real-time access to customer information locked away in
other enterprise applications," said David Wilson, vice president for WebSphere
Business Partners at IBM, in a statement. "With
WebSphere Cast Iron integration, SugarCRM clients get a 360-degree view of
their customers without logging into multiple applications and are able
maximize their productivity."
In related news, also at SugarCon, SugarCRM announced that it has acquired
iExtensions CRM from iEnterprises Inc. for
an undisclosed sum.
"We
are committed to providing our users with the most cutting-edge collaboration
and social business solutions," said Larry Augustin, CEO
of SugarCRM, in a statement. "This acquisition accelerates our product
strategy and allows our users to leverage the industry-leading features of
iExtensions in their Sugar deployments."
For
10 years iExtensions has been the leading CRM
solution on the market for IBM Lotus Notes,
and in 2010 was the winner of the Best in Lotusphere Showcase award, SugarCRM
officials said. iExtensions CRM was built
from the ground up on IBM Lotus
collaborative technologies, and features a scalable and configurable product
architecture.
The
newly acquired functionality adds enhanced support for IBM
collaboration tools inside Sugar 6. The added features include native Notes
support as well as Notes email and calendar plug-ins, and a connector to the IBM
Domino product line. These added features to Sugar 6 create a complete
collaboration suite inside the Sugar platform.
As
part of the acquisition, iEnterprises CEO
John Carini will join SugarCRM as vice president of Collaboration Solutions, effective
immediately, along with other key members of the development team. In addition,
iEnterprises will continue to sell its iExtensions framework as a certified
value-added reseller in the SugarCRM Open+ Partner Network.
Initial
availability of the iExtensions functionality will come in the spring 2011
release of Sugar 6, the company said.
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