SugarCRM Names 'App Throwdown' Winners at SugarCon

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Jun 16, 2016) - SugarCon 2016 - SugarCRM Inc., the company that enables businesses to create extraordinary customer relationships with the most empowering, adaptable and affordable CRM solution on the market, today announced the winners of its annual "App Throwdown" competition at SugarCon.

The App Throwdown is a showcase of the coolest, most useful and most innovative extensions of the Sugar platform. This year's focus was on technologies that help drive business transformation, improve communication and close more deals. Forty SugarCRM partners submitted entries in four categories: Mobile and IoT, Customer Engagement, User Productivity, and Customer Insights. In addition, the Sugar community of partners and customers voted on a "community favorite."

The overall "Best in Show" winner, Collab, was chosen by the SugarCon audience following creative and informative live demonstrations of all of the Best-in-Class applications. This year's Best-in-Class winners are:

• Mobile and IoT -- Collab -- Collab's new Facebook bot messenger for live customer engagement. In April 2016, Facebook announced a new messenger platform consisting of natural language, artificial intelligence-based bots. Collab has taken this Facebook API to new heights, integrating SugarCRM with its multimedia next-generation contact center. The live chat generates a lead that can be pursued via click-to-call within Sugar. The process can iterate in multiple touchpoints such as emails and Facebook posts.
  
  
• Customer Engagement -- Act-On -- Act-On's integration with Sugar fosters interdepartmental collaboration by making it easy for marketing to deliver more qualified, sales-ready leads to the sales team. Act-On's native, out-of-the-box integration allows businesses to attract, capture and nurture prospects, then convert leads directly into Sugar. Sales accesses Sugar to get real-time information, including prioritized leads and activity history.
  
  
• User Productivity -- Epicom -- Epicom's "Slack for Sugar" creates better experiences for customers and employees and keeps everyone on the same page. By combining Slack, one of the industry's hottest collaboration tools, with Sugar, users can create Sugar Cases or Notes from within Slack. At the end of each day all Slack conversations are automatically stored in Sugar. Settings can be adjusted so each user and channel has different levels of access. And, the integration knows to associate each new case or conversation with the right Contact and Account records -- so nothing ever slips through the cracks.
  
  
• Customer Insights -- TrustSphere -- TrustSphere's relationship analytics for Sugar helps users identify hidden contacts, prospects and partners. It uses real-time communication logs to make use of each employee's social network and combines it to create a powerful collective network. The LinksWithin capability uses the organization's combined social network to find the best path to a prospect company or individual. With one simple search on the LinksWithin dashlet in Sugar, LinksWithin shows the colleagues that have the strongest and most recent relationships to any particular individual or company.
  
  
• Community Favorite -- Accusoft -- Accusoft's "PrizmDoc for Sugar" is a responsive HTML5 document viewer that integrates into the Sugar platform, allowing users to display dozens of document and image file types within a web browser -- no downloading required. Dozens of file and image formats are supported. PrizmDoc for Sugar also lets users redact, search and sign Sugar attachments.
  
  

"The 2016 App Throwdown is SugarCRM's largest yet. The number of partners that submitted innovative technologies for this year's competition demonstrates the variety of outstanding solutions in our ecosystem for customers to enhance and customize the ways in which they benefit from Sugar," said Mark Weitzel, senior director, worldwide ISV alliances at SugarCRM. "Thank you to all the participants that are helping businesses transform customer relationships, and congratulations to all of the winners."

About SugarCRM
SugarCRM enables businesses to create extraordinary customer relationships with the most empowering, adaptable and affordable customer relationship management (CRM) solution on the market. Unlike traditional CRM solutions that focus primarily on management and reporting, Sugar empowers the individual, coordinating the actions of customer-facing employees and equipping them with the right information at the right time to transform the customer experience. Based in Silicon Valley, SugarCRM is backed by Goldman Sachs, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, NEA and Walden International. More than 1.5 million individuals in over 120 countries rely on SugarCRM. To learn more visit SugarCRM or follow @SugarCRM.

NOTE: SugarCRM and the SugarCRM logo are registered trademarks of SugarCRM Inc. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners.