SugarCRM is a full featured CRM (Customer Relationship Management) application for small business to the enterprise. Comprised from PHP and MySQL it is designed for maximum ease of deployment for the management of sales leads, business contacts, and more.

OSDir.com: Why and how did you get started?

John Roberts: We started SugarCRM in April of 2004 after resigning from our jobs in product management and engineering at E.piphany Inc. All three of us decided that if SugarCRM was to be a successful project we would need to work on it full-time, and fund development out of our own pockets initially.

OSDir.com: What do you think are its best features so far -or- planned?

We believe that user adoption is the most important element of successful CRM systems. From the beginning we designed Sugar as friendly, fast and powerful tool. We also think it's important that the application be somewhat entertaining for reps to use.

OSDir.com: What is cooking for future releases?

We ship new releases about every four to five months. For Sugar 3.5 to ship in early August we are focusing on modularity. This will allow the sugarforge.org developer community to more easily share functional components.

OSDir.com: What do you consider its biggest challenger?

Salesforce.com - proprietary software vendors who have tens of millions of dollars to burn on sales and marketing expenditures but who spend very little on software engineering themselves.

SugarCRM @ OSDir.com