SugarCRM, a developer and provider of open-source customer relationship management (CRM) software, is worth somewhere in the range of $350 and $360 million, according to a new report by research firm NeXt Up!

The open source CRM provider is expected to bring in around $107.7 million in revenue in 2013 and $95.8 million in 2012, according to the report. That’s peanuts when compared to Oracle’s latest earnings report (which indicated that the company brought in $8.6 billion in a single quarter). But for a company that was founded only six years ago and one that charges half of what most CRM providers charge for open source software, it’s pretty good.

The CRM space has exploded because it helps businesses of any size run more efficiently. It can provide a business with a number of tools that can help them handle customer service. Most come with analytics suites that help executives figure out which programs are working and which ones aren’t.

SugarCRM has an advantage with smaller and mid-sized businesses because it is usually much cheaper than other CRM providers. The service can cost around half of what some of the major CRM software providers charge. It doesn’t have the full functionality that some of them, like Salesforce, has — but it can do about 90 percent of what those services can, according to the report. Companies like Oracle and SAP likewise dominate the high-end of the market that typically has a much larger budget for CRM-like software.

SugarCRM users can deploy the software on in-house servers or on the public cloud, which involves shipping data through the Internet to remote servers that have a lot of computing firepower. The company partnered up with Amazon and Microsoft to let users deploy its software on Amazon’s EC2 and Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing services. 70 percent of SugarCRM’s revenue comes from licensing deals with partners that resell the software and help manage it, according to the report.

But because it is so cheap and because the development is open source, it can be difficult and time-consuming to install the software and the customer support can be lacking, according to the report. Around 70 percent of SugarCRM customers still choose to install the software on in-house hardware because it’s cheaper, rather than use hosted versions on public cloud servers.

The company’s valuation is still not even close to some of the dominant forces in the CRM software market, but for a provider of open source software it’s a pretty decent number. Salesforce, for example, is worth around $18 billion based on its market cap, and Oracle is worth a massive $160 billion when compared to SugarCRM’s valuation. That’s also considering that NeXt Up! raised the company’s valuation by about 48 percent based on its new revenue numbers.

Since it was founded, SugarCRM has collected around 600,000 users across 75 countries and is deployed on about 55,000 servers. The open source community that works on SugarCRM has around 150,000 active users and 22,000 developers. The community has made 800 applications that plug into the CRM suite to date.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based company was founded in 2004 and has more than 150 employees. To date, SugarCRM has raised $46 million in venture capital funding from firms like New Enterprise Associates, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Walden International. Its last round of funding came in 2008 when it raised $20 million.

NeXt Up! is a research firm co-founded by  Michael Moe, a former senior managing director and director of global growth research at Merrill Lynch.

Tags: Amazon EC2, cloud computing, CRM, customer relationship management, Microsoft Cloud Azure

Companies: Amazon, Microsoft, Sugarcrm

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

AT&T (T) was in touch this afternoon via email in response to Consumer Reports’s note this afternoon saying that the company was voted the worst U.S. wireless carrier by its readers.
AT&T’s response is as follows:
We take this seriously and we continually look for new ways to improve the customer experience. [...]

Article courtesy of BARRONS.com: Tech Trader Daily

Clovr Media, a developer of credit card-linked offers for online advertising, said today it has received $1.5 million in seed funding in order to launch a new platform that bridges the link between online deals for consumers and banks looking to re-connect their customer base.

Waltham, Mass.-based Clovr bills its new card-linked platform as part of its “Loyalty 2.0” campaign, which can now directly link digital ad spending to consumer purchases with 100 percent attribution. The new platform will be the first of its kind to convert banner, text-link, video or mobile ads into Card Linked Offers (CLOs) automatically.

A bank’s customer would like this because when clicked, CLOs link product discounts directly to a their credit/debit card with no point of sale hoopla, no mail-in rebates and no paper coupons. Discounts just appear directly on a consumer’s bank statement.

Clovr said consumers will then feel more connected to their financial institution and put those banks “top of the wallet,” because they are being offered first crack at ads that have learned their preferences and buying habits—and won’t have to do anything to achieve those discounts except click specific ads.

Clovr Media also announced today that has joined the  ”12

Home energy management company Tendril announced it has acquired GroundedPower, a software company that focuses on behavioral-based engagement of consumers.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The company also announced it has raised $23 million in a fourth round of financing. Investors include TIAA-CREF, Good Energies, VantagePoint Venture Partners, RRE Ventures and GE.

“The backdrop of all of the last two to three years in smart grid has been about plumbing,” said CEO Adrian Tuck in an interview with VentureBeat. Tendril specializes in such plumbing — the company makes a platform that connects utilities and customers through its associated home energy management software and hardware. “We’re finally — belatedly, in my view — getting into consumer view about how to get consumers to play into these systems.”

That’s where Massachusetts-based GroundedPower comes in. GroundedPower competes with companies like OPower, which helps utilities meet efficiency goals by managing consumer engagement. Like OPower, it uses behavioral science to engage and motivate customers to reduce costs. GroundedPower has rolled out its iCES product across New York state and Cape Cod, where it got pilot participants to achieve 9.3 percent energy savings.

The software, which users can access online or through a smartphone, starts with two simple questions to get a sense of what motivates the customer to save energy — a pointed counter to what Tuck says feels like “thousands of questions” posed by Microsoft’s Hohm. The software gradually builds a conversation with users, asking questions over time, offering insight about energy usage, and eventually suggesting ways to save money and offering products and services customers can tap into, like a smart thermostat or an air conditioning fix.

“The smart grid industry has been laboring under the idea that consumers have been kept in the dark about their consumption, which is true. What’s not true is that the immediate response is to bombard consumers with data,” Tuck said. ”Not all consumers want to interact with these systems every day. Finding non-disruptive ways to get consumers to interact with this technology is going to be key.”

Tendril will offer a new product that integrates GroundedPower’s capabilities in the first quarter of next year.

Getting consumers to turn green is certainly a matter of human psychology — some companies have tried using the carrot; others, the stick. Some cities, for example, impose a tax on plastic bags. Washington, D.C., has found that policy effective in cutting down plastic bag use, although the Wall Street Journal argues that it’s guilt, not the fee, that elicits results.

In the case of commercial users, utilities simply dangle financial incentives for buildings to cut energy use during peak load times. It’s a hot area called demand response that Comverge and EnerNOC have been especially effective in.

GroundedPower’s team consists of engineers with backgrounds from NYU and Microsoft labs. Its founders, interestingly, were behind a top smoking-cessation website. Smoking cessation, weight loss and energy efficiency are all areas in which “consumers are keen to see reductions but find it very difficult in practice to know where to begin and how to make change persistent,” the company said in a statement.

“We talk about insight, choice, and control. Ultimately that should end up with consumers controlling things,” Tuck said. “Consumers really just want to be told every now and then, ‘Here’s some things you can do.’”

Tags: consumer engagement, energy efficiency, home energy management, Smart Grid

Companies: GE, Good Energies, GroundedPower, RRE Ventures, Tendril, TIAA CREF, VantagePoint Venture Partners

People: Adrian Tuck

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

CSG Systems (CSGS) shares are down sharply after Kaufman Bros.  analyst Karl Keirstead this morning cut his rating on the customer care and billing services provider to Hold from Buy. He contends that the risk profile at the company has been increased “materially” after the news Friday that it will [...]

Article courtesy of BARRONS.com: Tech Trader Daily

Intel chief executive Paul Otellini just appeared on the Fox Business TV Network. In the interview with Fox’s Liz Claman, he explained why Intel is buying the wireless business of Infineon for $1.4 billion and McAfee for $7.68 billion, as well as the cable modem business of Texas Instruments for an undisclosed price. Here’s a link to the Intel video, and the highlights are excerpted below. I have also embedded the videos, part 1 and part 2, at the bottom.

On Steve Job’s reaction to Intel’s purchase of Infineon:

“Steve was very happy. The industry was abuzz that this business unit was on the market, and there were a number of competing companies for it. I think they are very happy that Intel won the bid.”

On why it took Intel so long to make this purchase:

“There were a number of these that were available. In our mind this was the best technology we could find at the right price. We are very happy with the capabilities of the company and their customer list.”

On buying Infineon wireless business:

“The key thing is the technology they have today, the customer connections they have today, and where the technology in general is going. We look forward to a period in the not so distant future where all of these functions can be on a single chip. Intel has great capabilities and applications processors today, but bringing in the capabilities for 3G and ultimately LTE (Long-term Evolution) onto the chip, that makes a lot of sense to us from an economic and power standpoint.”

On how McAfee will be integrated into their products:

“The first products will be things we have worked on before the acquisition discussions, which will come into the PC platforms next year. We will take the combination of hardware based security that Intel already produces and enhance that with software capability from McAfee. That will only get better in PCs over time. Then what we would like to do is drive that same capability not just into smartphones, but also anything that is going to get smart and get connected; your television, your cars, are all going to have internet connections. You want that same protection. We call this a third pillar of computing. We have energy-efficient performance, we have connectivity, and now we’ve got security.”

On when they will be able to put Infineon technology and atom chip technology onto a single chip:

“You will see them combined inside a phone as separate chips next year. The single chip implementation will be farther down the road.”

On whether having Apple as a client was a driving force in their desire to purchase Infineon:

“It wasn’t the overwhelming factor. These technologies today are discrete chips. We like the fact that they have a good revenue stream, but really where the technology can go over time is important to us. We have a had a multi-radio strategy for many years starting with WiFi and WiMax, this brings 3G and ultimately LTE and GPS capabilities into our portfolio to be able to use in all of our devices.”

On the strategy behind selling XScale only to reenter the wireless realm with the purchase of Infineon:

“It’s 180 degrees from what we sold. What we had was an XScale-based applications processor business with a little bit of comms technology in it. Today what we are picking up is a big comms business with the baseband technology the protocol stack and all the software that goes with it. People want the capability of Intel architecture for their apps processor and the capability of Intel Silicon, and the combination of those was something we didn’t have in the divestiture of the XScale business four or five years ago.”

On his criticism of the Obama administration not being “business friendly”:

“I wasn’t taking on the administration per say, I was taking on the trends that I have seen in the last couple of administrations. The two specific things I talked about were the R&D tax credit, making that permanent. That has not been permanent for 25 years. The same thing with corporate tax rates. Raising them in this environment is really not conducive to making  companies competitive globally, which makes them less prone to hire people here. This is not just this administration, this is talking about this trend towards what we need to be more competitive as a nation going forward.”

On what advice he would give Obama on how to create jobs:

“The most important thing the current administration can do is remove the number of variables out there. There are so many things where business leaders can’t predict what’s going to happen. Businesses don’t like uncertainty. When you start reducing the variables and putting predictability into the system, you can now make informed decisions.”

On the prediction for PC industry growth:

“We are still tracking as an industry to have a growth rate this year in the 18 to 20% range, which is the best year in the industry in quite some time.”

On whether he expects to acquire any other companies in the near future:

“This is three announcements in two weeks. We also purchased the cable modem business from Texas Instruments. All these have been in flight for some time. This is enough for us to chew on for a while. Having said that though, if the right technology company becomes available at the right price, we’ll take a look at it. We don’t have an acquisition strategy per say. We have a number of strategies around platforms, and we will use acquisition to selectively fill holes that we don’t have.”

Watch the latest video at video.foxbusiness.com Watch the latest video at video.foxbusiness.com

Companies: fox, Infineon, Intel

People: Paul Otellini, Steve Jobs

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

Flowtown, a company that connects data from social media sites with a company’s email list, announced Wednesday that it raised a seed round of funding for $750,000. The funds will be used to hire more people, especially developers familiar with Ruby, a coding framework for Web development.

The company targets small businesses looking to do more with their email lists. Once launched, customers upload their email lists, either manually or by importing them from mail services like Google’s Gmail. The service matches social profiles on sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, to the email addresses. The list also shows the person’s location and ranking on Klout, a tool that determines a person’s influence among users of the Twitter microblogging service.

Once the social data is available, the customer can create marketing campaigns. Similar to sending a basic email, the campaign includes a subject title and body of text. The only difference is that the customer chooses a social channel on which to send the message, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Flickr and StumbleUpon. For example, a customer could create a specific message, such as “I found you on Twitter,” to go to the people who have Twitter profiles within their email list.

The company says its service integrates with other businesses tools, such as MailChimp, iContact, CampaignMonitor, BatchBook, and Wufoo. Interestingly, MailChimp appears to have its own social aggregation tool for email lists.

The San Francisco-based company, founded in 2009, claims to be working with more than 15,000 businesses. Investors include Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Software; Mark Goines, a former Mint.com board member; Dave McClure of 500 Startups; Steve Anderson of Baseline Ventures; Saar Gur at Charles River Ventures; and Travis Kalanick, Auren Hoffman, Brian Norgard, and Dan Gould.

Tags: email, email lists, email marketing, Social networks

Companies: Flowtown

People: Auren Hoffman, Brian Norgard, Dan Gould, Dave McClure, Mark Goines, Mitch Kapor, Saar Gur, Steve Anderson, Travis Kalanick

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

As more and more companies seem to be jumping on the social media bandwagon, Lithium Technologies is beefing up its services with the acquisition of a startup called Scout Labs.

The news was first reported yesterday in TechCrunch, prior to any official announcement. Chief executive and cofounder Lyle Fong confirmed the acquisition to VentureBeat today, and also said that the rumored price of between $20 and $25 million is correct.

Lithium builds customer communities for businesses like Barnes & Noble and Lenovo, but Fong said companies are increasingly interested in monitoring what customers were saying on social services like Twitter. So Emeryville, Calif.-based Lithium went looking for a social media monitoring service. It settled on Scout Labs, Fong said, because the two companies shared a philosophy that these tools shouldn’t just be used by marketing and customer service teams: “Every person in the company should be closer to the customer.”

Lithium will continue selling Scout Labs’ products, but will also be looking into ways to integrate the services.

Scout Labs raised more than $4 million from Minor Ventures, El Dorado Venture Partners, and Javelin Ventures. Lithium has raised $44 million, with a recent valuation, according to Fong, of $160 million. The company is open to more acquisitions

“There’s always something new in horizon with the social web,” Fong said. “As new technologies pop up, we’ll have to decide whether we should buy it or build it. For now, I think we have our hands full.”

Companies: Lithium Technologies, Scout Labs

People: Lyle Fong

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

JA Solar (JASO) this morning said it now sees Q1 shipments of more than 265 MW, up from previous guidance of 215-225 MW.

“During the first quarter, we saw robust demand from existing and new customers,” CEO Peng Fang said in a statement. “By streamlining the company’s existing solar cell manufacturing facility, JA Solar is able to achieve higher than expected production to meet strong customer orders.  We also won several new European customers during the quarter, which further diversified our customer base and provides better visibility for the full year.”

JASO said it expects to report Q1 results in mid-May.

JASO in early trading is up 56 cents, or 9.9%, to $6.23.

Article courtesy of BARRONS.com: Tech Trader Daily