What a diversified ecosystem means to you, as a customer…

Today's guest post comes from a man who needs no introduction; John Mertic of SugarCRM. John wears many hats including, but not limited to, Community Manager at SugarCRM, author, speaker, board member of OW2, and secretary of the OpenSocial Foundation.

See Part 1: What a diversified ecosystem means to you, as an integration provider…

Earlier this week I did a post calling out Sugar’s very own Martin Schneider’s recent blog post on SugarCRM as “The Nexus of Engagement”. I specifically targeted our ecosystem providers in that post, but wanted to come back and address customers of SugarOutfitters as well, and how the diversity in the ecosystem helps you.

Organizations today are quite diverse, coming from all sorts of backgrounds. Mergers and acquisitions are over double what we’ve seen 20 years ago, and often times these sorts of deals bring in multiple software stacks. Unifying IT systems in these cases are a huge cost, so finding ways to build bridges between systems in crucial to staying competitive in the market.

But outside of that, even organizations without that baggage tend to like to not live in any one providers ecosystem alone. I saw a great quote in an article recently from Rob Koplowitz of Forrester Research:

"The suite brings you a broad array of capabilities that are highly integrated, but it potentially locks you into a single-vendor stack. There might be implications about the quality of the different parts of the solution and, if it's running in the cloud, about the ability to integrate it with other on-premise systems"

In short, organizations realize today that staying competitive means being nimble and agile, and being locked into a single-vendor stack makes that difficult to achieve.

So how does the Sugar ecosystem, with the many applications listed on Sugar Outfitters and other sites help this? We inherently believe in the “best of breed” approach, making it easy to bring in any component or integrate any application to make the CRM solution work for you. This is a unique proposition on the market, and makes not only a solution provider, but a solution partner. Our success is your success, which goes right along with our mantra of “every user, every customer, every time”.

Don’t be tempted by the simple, neat, and tidy packaging of closed ecosystems; the trade offs are real and can be damaging to your business. Lets the openness of Sugar and it’s vast ecosystem help bring your business to the next level, enabling you to sell and support your customers more effectively than ever before.