Clint Oram, Co-Founder, SugarCRM in an interaction with Biztech2.0 gives a comparative view of different CRM models and their adoption trends.

On Demand CRM and CRM through SaaS is believed to take over the On Premise model in India? What are your views on this?

The usage of On Demand CRM continues to gain traction around the world. It works very well for the majority of businesses deploying their first CRM system. However there are some companies that have very strict data management policies that don’t allow their customer data to be stored outside the company’s direct control. There are other companies that have legacy IT infrastructure that requires the data to be local for integration purposes. For these companies, traditional On Demand CRM doesn’t meet their needs. SugarCRM can deliver the same software solution via both traditional On Demand and traditional On Premise deployment options.

More interestingly, physical location of where the software is hosted and management of the hosting infrastructure has evolved dramatically in the past two years, via cloud computing. The customers of SugarCRM can also leverage private cloud infrastructure to run our software as a service, but still maintain direct control over the management of the data.

Many of SugarCRM’s larger customers with strict data management needs, run their CRM solution in the Amazon EC2 cloud computing environment. Where the infrastructure is delivered as a service, our local implementation partners manage the software application as a service and the customer 'owns' the data storage environment, thereby ensuring compliance to data management policies. We call this type of hybrid SaaS delivery model, ‘Distributed SaaS’.

Which Micro Verticals will SugarCRM target in India?

Through our local Indian implementation partners, SugarCRM is focusing on the BFSI, manufacturing, healthcare, and education verticals. All these industries are traditional first adopters of new CRM technologies, as they primarily differentiate themselves in their marketplaces through the quality of customer interaction experience. Doing a better job than their competitors, around building a successful customer relationship is often the difference between gaining or losing a customer when products and services have become commoditised.

On the basis of your study of the Indian CRM market, what is the maturity level this market has reached?

We see 2010 as a year of significant growth in the Indian CRM market. Through the growing adoption of Sugar Community Edition and the growing number of customer wins our local implementation partners are seeing in India, we see a very promising year for CRM growth in India. Today’s business executives recognise that after investing in back-office systems like ERP and SCM, now is the time to invest in front-office systems like CRM to make their sales people more effective and responsive to customers. Indian companies recognise that more efficient and effective sales people translate very quickly to more revenue growth.

Tell us about your experience of CRM adoption in the Canadian, US and Europe markets?

Our strategy from the inception of the company in 2004 is to follow downloads of our Community Edition into markets around the world. If we see strong downloads of the Sugar Community Edition, and local implementation firms are signing up as Sugar value added resellers, we know that there is a market for the Sugar Professional Edition. We’ve seen this same pattern in dozens of countries around the world in the past and are seeing it today in India. SugarCRM’s strong international features combined with local implementation partners, who know the local markets, have resulted in 50% of our revenue coming from outside the US. We look forward to repeating that success in India.