Q] How can companies and social CRM technology providers make social projects more than just engagement objectives and actually link social activities to clear and measurable business objectives?

A year ago, when we talked about social connected CRM capabilities, there was not much interest in the industry. Today, both enterprises and consumers are engaging in social CRM.

Companies want to know more about their customers. They not only want access customer information in the traditional CRM format but also their social information.

What we have done is build social media activity feeds into our product line. We have collaborated Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and many other social sites that provide enterprises to know their customers better. So when an enterprise deals with its customers, they can see the customer interactions and engagements inside Sugar in an organized fashion. Using these interactions, businesses can create sales opportunities.

Q] What differentiates your offerings when compared with Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce.com’s CRM tech?

The primary differentiator for us has been the openness and flexibility of our solutions. We provide enterprises the choice to choose the kind of deployment that suits them best. They are not restricted to any one kind of offering.

If a company is looking at an on-demand model we can host it for them. Similarly, we offer on-site solution. We also provide solutions via the cloud, which is not a re-marketing of the concept of software as a service. It is the ability to move business applications anywhere to any of the services coming from any of the providers.

We believe in taking advantage of the commoditization of technologies in the market. Take the case of one of our recent customer acquisitions, with over thousand employees. They had subscribed to one of our competitors two and half year ago. Some time back when they went to renew, they realized that the pricing was not good enough, and came to us. This was due to the commoditization of technology. The cost of storage, bandwidth, CPU etc. has reduced but providers do not factor these costs in to their offerings.

The other differentiator for us is the use of open source model that gives us a compelling proposition in terms of pricing and the involvement of 50,000 worldwide developer community. Our solutions are not proprietary and there is no vendor lock-in.

Q] You have been aggressively marketing against Salesforce.com. Your website says that you guarantee Salesforce.com customers will save 50 percent by switching to SugarCRM. Can you explain?

Typically, Salesforce.com is twice as priced as Sugar CRM. Many a times, enterprises negotiate with Salesforce, and get a good deal in the first year. However, in the second year, it goes back to the list price. Plus there are many add-ons that users do not know about.

The content has been on our site for a year now, and it has been a fabulous way to bring Salesforce.com customers to our platform.

Q] Do you plan to move into different application areas, such as ERP or financial software, in the future?

We do not have any plans to shift to other application areas. The opportunity in the CRM space is huge, both globally and in India.

IDC predicted that the global CRM market is valued at $ 17 billion in 2011, and is expected to grow to $ 21 billion by 2014.

India is dominating the growth trend of the global market with the packaged CRM business growing at 16 to18 percent. Globally, the market is growing by around six percent. This is the primary reason that we want to increase our resources, support and investment into India to gain market share.

Source : CXOtoday