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SugarCRM has announced the release of a newly architected product designed to better serve the needs of the user. The new user experience, termed Sugar UX, moves the company from "the CRM first-wave record view, to a much more streamlined, modern interface that is more in line with the tools people use today in their personal lives," Martin Schneider, SugarCRM's head of product evangelism, describes. Sugar UX gives users graphs that help them visually conceptualize information, and features inline editing throughout the system. SugarCRM can be accessed on smartphones, tablets, and PCs. Enhanced de-duplication will help improve data quality. Sugar UX also pulls in contextual information from outside the CRM system to help users. Data from LinkedIn, Dun & Bradstreet, HootSuite, Box, Docusign, and ERP systems can provide valuable information that can shape a sales call and gauge the strength of a prospect.
Activity streams within the user interface will also apprise users of team updates and system notifications, for example, keeping them aware of company activity as a whole. SugarCRM also introduced Sugar PurePrice, which offers different tiers of access. The most expensive, Sugar Ultimate, costs $150 per user per month and includes an assigned technical account manager and round-the-clock support. Sugar Enterprise costs $60 per user per month and includes product-level forecasting and line-item opportunity management, as well as custom Activity Streams. Below that, Sugar Corporate costs $45 per month, and Sugar Professional $35 per month. In contrast, Salesforce.com's most popular edition costs $125 a month, with five plans ranging from $5 to $300. In addition to gaining more customers across the board, "we hope existing companies will take a look and give this to everybody that touches the customer, not just salespeople," Schneider states, naming receptionists and those working on fulfillment orders as two classes of employees who might be added to a company-wide CRM initiative. SugarCRM also announced that it earned a profit in the third quarter of 2013, which experienced 80 percent year-over-year revenue growth. During that time period, SugarCRM added 670 new customers and expanded the contracts of 850 existing customers. This marks the sixteenth consecutive quarter of increased revenue for the privately held company. In August, Goldman Sachs invested an additional $40 million in the nearly decade-old company.
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