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Clint Oram

SugarCRM Extends India Footprint

Interviewed by Tasneem Balapurwala Fri, Feb 26, 2010

image Salesforce.com is involved with large enterprises and not focusing on small and medium sized organizations as in the past. This segment is our sweet spot as they now prefer us over them. image

Clint Oram Co-founder, VP- Products, SugarCRM

As an open source organization, what are your expansion plans on a global basis?

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ORAM: In operation since 2004, SugarCRM has over 6000 customers worldwide in over 30 countries. As a commercial open source company, we have over 6 million downloads of SugarCRM products and approximately 10000 of them originate from India.  The pro product Sugar Professional with more features, support training and management is the sale point. Worldwide, we plan to increase our partner size from 250 to around 1000 by year end. On the technology front, we will expand our cloud footprint making large investments to run SugarCRM on Amazon, MC2 cloud or other cloud environment. The idea is to make it easy for partners and enable local VARs to build local CRM SaaS businesses.

How does the channel fructify from this revenue model? Does alliance with SugarCRM translate into profitable business for partner community?

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ORAM: Besides selling our products to customer, partners are consultants at one level too. CRM it is not a point solution like e-mail or telepresence. It embodies a continuous process which is a natural interaction between a company and its customers. Just deploying a technology or turning on software does not translate to success in CRM world. According to independent research reports, most CRM implementations of organizations fail because they simply turn on technology without changing control process of mapping technology to their people and processes. Partners act as strategic implementation consultants, map the processes to the software, train the employees and move towards business optimization.

How will you combat competition from more established names like Salesforce.com?

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ORAM: Salesforce.com is more involved with large enterprises and not focusing much on small and medium sized organizations as in the past .This segment is our sweet spot as companies with 10 - 1000 employees now prefer us over them. Being a channel based company; we are quite distinct from Salesforce.com. The price point is much more geared in SMB market and our easy to apply solution with no hidden costs is a differentiator from competition.

India seems to tag along with the global strategy of SugarCRM . How do you intend to expand operations in this part of the world?

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ORAM: Our major revenues emerge from US (half of total revenue) and Europe contributes another third of it. We are currently investing more in partners across APAC and India is a big focal point. The several thousand leads emerging from India every month was the prime reason for our formal entry into this marketplace. Present here in the form of free downloads, we are accelerating business through partners. We are not yet ready to open Indian office.

Does it imply that SugarCRM is partnering with channels to address the addressable Indian market?

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ORAM: A typical model for CRM would be from 1x to 3x, i.e. the subscription cost is the implementation cost. To implement the software, the first step is data migration, training, transfer of processes and customization and finally followed by maintenance and upgrades. Partners sell professional services and implementation services over it. BHEA is our leading partner in India .Also a consultant for our products; it will do custom implementation and take our professional product to the market.

Is your alliance with BHEA on a pan India basis? What’s your roadmap to align with other partners?

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ORAM: With offices in Nagpur and Bangalore, BHEA is opening offices in Coimbatore, Chennai and Delhi by April this year. As leads increase and market demand rises, they will expand to tier II cities. The marketing mechanism is mostly through word of mouth based on the open source product. We have three other partners in India. Presently, we are investing more in BHEA, as they stand out as major contributor to SugarCRM.



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