SugarCRM sews up sweet deal to buy out junior upstart Stitch SugarCRM – producers of customer relationship management system Sugar – have acquired the intellectual property rights "and other assets" of mobile start-up Stitch. Stitch is a the sales automation outfit - or, as they would put it, a "personalised digital assistant" that offers integrated analysis of email, calendar and CRM …
Dangled out there for us developers/users who are enticed by the kimono wafting in the breeze, only to be brought back to the cold, cruel ground of "You want it, you gotta pay for it."
Now, I totally understand a bright individual/group wanting to get their wares exposed to as many Jills and Johns as possible. Open source it. Reap the benefits of the contributions from the open source world. Encapsulate those contributions back into the lusciousness of the main product.
Then, when us J&J's are hooked, require a pretty significant entry fee to get the next "fix".
It's sort of a rock-and-a-hard-place. Many of the other pure Open Source CRM packages have been bought out recently. I started an evaluation of possible alternatives to the ACT application of 8+ years ago and during my 4-6 month evaluation period, 2 of the OSS contenders had stopped supporting their products or had come under the wing of some commercial group.
Of course, SalesForce is always the one to beat. And, like Oracle, they will do whatever they can to beat, nay destroy, you.
When Sugar closed sourced their CRM, we were on Enterprise. I ran a project and ported the whole lot over to the final version of the CE OSS edition.
It's now maintained by a 3rd party company who do dev work for us, and I saved $50k pa, on a 150user base!
Bugs are fixed more quickly, and we are free to prioritise our own (useful) upgrades; unlike when we were asking Sugar for years to put business functionality into the core product, but kept getting social media plugins!
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