SugarCRM Launches App Store for Commercial CRM Users
Salesforce.com's AppExchange, introduced in 2008, is the granddaddy of enterprise application stores, marketplaces where users can download a wide variety of business apps. According to the company, the AppExchange ecosystem has generated over $1 billion for Salesforce and developers who have built apps on its platform.
A number of other software companies have followed Salesforce's lead, introducing repositories of enterprise apps and integrations that extend the functionality of their flagship platforms.
The latest company to do so is SugarCRM, which yesterday launched SugarExchange, an app store for users of its commercial CRM software that features third-party applications and integration software to extend Sugar deployments. Application categories include:
- Marketing, including campaign management, marketing automation, email marketing, marketing analytics and social management
- Sales, including performance management, configure price quote (CPQ), proposal and contract management and eCommerce
- Service and Support, including multichannel contact center, computer telephony integration (CTI), field service, social service and service analytics
- Integration and Management, including ERP, accounting and financial management and integration platforms
- Productivity, including content management, Web conferencing, enterprise collaboration and email
- Data and Analytics
As with other app stores, APIs developed by SugarCRM enable partners and customers to achieve deep integration with Sugar and to build applications that leverage its features. For even deeper integration, SugarCRM offers access to its source code.
Professional software developers interested in developing or listing applications and integration software products on SugarExchange are encouraged to join SugarCRM's Technology Partner Program.
“When we launched Sugar 7, we began the process of separating our commercial and community editions of Sugar to better serve our growing roster of enterprise clients,” said Clint Oram, SugarCRM co-founder and chief technology officer, in a statement, adding that the commercial-only version of SugarExchange is ‘the next step in the evolution of our ecosystem.”
Users of Sugar Community Edition, the company's free and open source software, can find add-ons and extensions in a new SugarCE-Add-Ons repository hosted on GitHub. According to SugarCRM, the new CE add-on repository enables enhanced control for developers who create listings, making it easy to fork, pull and clone code streams. Anyone can create listings for their add-ons, suggest new categories and otherwise participate in the Sugar open source community.
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