Ideally this would have been published a couple of months ago at the actual four year anniversary (October) of the release of SuiteCRM. We were so focused on customer projects and the development of the SuiteCRM 7.10 release, that the date passed. We forgot to celebrate it either internally or with the community that engages with the project.SuiteCRM has an obvious connection with SugarCRM. Between 2004 and 2013 SugarCRM were one of the hottest tech tickets in town. Today, they're largely irrelevant. We don't find them on bid/candidate technology lists very often. They don't get mentioned in sales conversations. We encounter them mostly when their customers approach us to migrate to SuiteCRM. However, it's impossible to write this article without reference to them.My personal history goes back to the earliest versions of SugarCRM in 2004. In those days, their website contained the following inspiring statement:“When you build a commercial grade CRM application based on the combined ideas and resources from CRM developers across the globe, you simply produce a better, more revolutionary product than any proprietary software or hosting company can think-up and build on its own. We believe the SugarCRM open source business model is far more efficient than the classic approach to building propriety CRM software. We do not believe in the notion of hiding access to code in order to lock-in customers.”We could write that same statement today. Replace SugarCRM with SuiteCRM and it works. It encapsulates the things that are great and good about open source. It embraces the open source development model. It embraces the community of users and developers that surround any great open source project. It represents the SuiteCRM values .
