SugarCRM to open Australia office

SugarCRM planned to establish a Sydney office in the coming months to help facilitate growth in Australia, the company's third largest market by revenue. 

The Australian office would join Germany as the open-source CRM provider’s second office outside of the US.

SugarCRM was in search of a location and would announce a country manager next month, Doug Erickson, vice president of channel sales in the Asia Pacific at SugarCRM, told CRN.

Wrapping up a three week Asia Pacific roadshow for customers and partners called CRM Accelaration, Erickson said the company also planned to recuit support technical and account managers.

“Australia is extremely important to Sugar. It's number three and we’ve decided to invest more into it,” he said. “We’ve done this pretty successfully in Munich. We started in Munich with two or three people three years ago and now we have 30."

Further, Erickson said SugarCRM planned to grow its partner base from 14 partners with a focus on new areas. 

“We are looking at some areas that are under served currently. Australia is huge we really need to start on the west coast," he said. 

Adding: “We rely on our partners entirely. System integrators with very strong business expertise.

"CRM is not a transaction sale it’s consultative sale. Ninety percent is understanding the business problem,” he said.  

Hostest options

SugarCRM is a “flexible solution” and deployment included on-site in a data centre, managed hosting or the public cloud. SugarCRM’s public cloud partners include Microsoft Azure, Amazon EC2 and Rackspace and IBM.

In a sign of changing times, Erickson said three years ago in the US 80 percent of customers chose on-site deployments. By the end of 2010 over 60 percent chose on-demand.

“When we look at Australian usage of Sugar it's parallel to the US. What we can tell in Australia is that more than 50 percent of our customers are hosted by a third party. We see a very strong adoption of on-demand going on in the industry right now. "