SugarCRM Launches Discover Analytics Tool

SugarCRM today launched Sugar Discover, a sophisticated analytics solution acquired from Corvana, a CRM analytics technology provider.

The solution will be available directly in the SugarCRM technology, so there will be no need to buy business intelligence and other tools to take advantage of Sugar Discover's ability to automate 24/7 monitoring of CRM data and detect events while delivering important intelligence to users, according to Richard Daley, the company's general manager of analytics and the former CEO and co-founder of Corvana.

The product goes a step further with Discovery Insights, revealing related facts and patterns that might be contributing to the root cause. It also enables Sugar customers to go back in time to review history, understand trends, and make predictions about the future.

"We built Sugar Discover from day one to work with CRM data. This is a move from rear-view to real-time insights, providing early warning signals that allow businesses to adapt, change course and take advantage of trends as they’re happening," Daley said in a statement. "We wanted to solve that with a cloud-based analytical solution that would eliminate as many manual steps as possible. This is Sugar's no-touch information strategy at work. It's all automated."

In an interview with CRM, Daley adds that "Most people approach analytics in a very horizontal way. This solution is automating around the CRM data.

Sugar Discover takes a proactive approach, he says, rather than the reactive approach of typical business intelligence tools.

Furthermore, Daley concedes that while historical data is certainly an important element in the analysis that Sugar Discover provides, the tool also monitors real-time data on a 24x7 basis and then provides automatic notifications if data is trending positively or negatively. And, rather than just providing simple notifications, the software can also provide the top reasons for the trend. For example, if sales declines significantly, the software might correlate that to changes in personnel. The software could also link the drop to a poorly performing product sector or something else, that, without the software, could be very difficult to detect.

SugarCRM has already released the product to some customers , but general availability won't be until Oct. 18. Pricing will be announced at the same time, according to David Campbell, the company's vice president of product marketing. Pricing will be based on a single subscription per company, which might have unlimited users accessing the solution's cloud-based capabilities at the same time.

Sugar Discover will be offered to all new SugarCRM users. Daley also expects significant interest from current customers.

"I've been with other technology companies," Daley says. "I've used other CRM packages. I know how hard it is to get this information. Usually you have to extract the information and put it onto a spreadsheet or use very expensive business intelligence tools."

Such legacy approaches are also very manual and don't offer the automated alerts, Daley adds. "We knew to get this up and running we would have to automate the process rather than going the traditional BI route."

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