Frequently Asked Questions

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a process to manage customer information and communication in order to provide a superior customer experience. The goal of CRM is to maximize the value of each customer interaction and thereby make each customer relationship as profitable as possible.

CRM is typically supported by software systems that manage customer information and interactions. CRM systems can be broadly categorized into the following groups:

Sales Force Automation (SFA) - Systems that automate sales lead generation as well as tracking of qualified sales opportunities. These systems typically help enforce a repeatable sales process that has been proven successful for a given company or market. SFA systems often automate the management of product catalogs, pricing, and proposal generation.

Customer Service and Support - Systems that track customer service inquires and resolution to customer problems. These systems often track customer satisfaction metrics or other measures of success.

Marketing Campaign Management - Systems that automate direct customer communication in-person or via mail or email. These systems typically track the cost of customer acquisition by linking marketing and sales expense to leads and ultimately, sales generated.

Project and Implementation Management - Systems that track and automate projects critical to customer success. These systems are often used to manage customer implementation processes and to communicate project status to different departments in an organization.

For more information, see the Wikipedia.

Open Source Software (OSS) is computer software for which the human-readable source code is made available under a copyright license. This permits users to use, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified form. It is very often developed in a public, collaborative manner. A report by Standish Group says that adoption of open source has resulted in savings of about $60 billion per year to consumers. For more information on OSS from the Wikipedia, click here.

Epicom provides domain name registration at no additional cost for customers on the Standard, Advanced, and Premium hosting services. Customers on the Starter hosting service can have Epicom register a domain name for $35 annually. Customers without a domain name will access their SugarCRM system using a URL of the format "yourcompanyname.epicom.com."

Yes. Regardless of your hosting package, you can always move your system in-house at anytime without penalty. If you need our help, Epicom will be happy to configure, install, and support your in-house SugarCRM system for you.

Yes. In fact, large, high performance SugarCRM systems are our specialty. We have developed a proprietary distributed architecture for SugarCRM that utilizes load balancing and server clustering to achieve tremendous speed advantages for larger systems. Depending on your size and user demands Epicom might deploy:

• Separate web and database servers.
• Redundant database servers for increased performance and scalability.
• Dedicated servers for reporting to minimize the load on production systems.

Regardless of your size, Epicom can deliver a high-performance hosting architecture to meet your requirements.

Not if you are using one of our standard hosting packages. Setup of your server and CRM application is included in the monthly fee. For customers with special hosting requirements, highly customized system, or other special needs, we will develop a custom hosting package that typically includes professional services for set-up and support.

Yes. Epicom provides a daily and weekly backup service for all hosted customers at no additional cost. But unlike normal backup services, Epicom takes a complete image of each customer's entire virtual server during each backup. This means that images can be restored much more quickly and reliably if needed. We keep the most recent full daily and full weekly backup in the same enterprise-caliber data center where customer servers are located. So a server restore, if needed, is a quick and painless process.

For customers with more demanding backup needs, Epicom also offers an affordable off-site backup service.

Yes, Epicom provides commercial SSL certificates for each hosting customer on the Advanced or Premium hosting plan at no additional cost. Customers on the Standard hosting plan can add SSL encryption to their CRM system for $100/year.

Yes, Epicom provides off-site backup services for hosted customers on the Advanced and Premium hosting plans at no additional cost. Epicom also provides off-site backup for customers on the Standard hosting plan for an additional $50/month. Customers that manage their own SugarCRM servers can also utilize Epicom's off-site backup service. Prices for this service vary based on the amount of data being stored by the customer.

If you have an Epicom support agreement, you can use the time provided in that agreement for:

• Telephone Support
• Customizing SugarCRM
• User or system admin training
• Routine system administration tasks like updates and upgrades
• Custom report creation
• Planning your next CRM project

No. We are experts in delivering the highest possible performance from SugarCRM. Our servers are custom-tuned for the specific needs of SugarCRM and should not be used for email or general website hosting. If you need email services or general web hosting, please contact us and we will help you or refer you to one of our trusted business partners.

We often work with clients who are weighing the pros and cons of hosting their SugarCRM system in house versus having Epicom host it. Companies with an existing web server that is not being used to capacity often see self hosting as an easy way to save money. In some cases this is true. But to do a proper cost/benefit analysis, it's important to keep in mind all of the things that are included in Epicom's hosted offerings.

Every instance of SugarCRM hosted by Epicom benefits from the following services which are included in our monthly hosting charges:

• Performance Enhancements - All of our servers are custom configured specifically for SugarCRM. We have spent hundreds of hours testing every method possible to make Sugar run faster. As a hosted customer you benefit from all that we have learned about running Sugar fast without having to learn these lessons yourself.
• LAMP Stack Maintenance - We monitor and apply all appropriate patches to your server's operating system as well as patches to Apache, MySQL, and PHP as soon as they are available. Your server will stay secure and up-to-date without your having to think about it.
• SugarCRM Upgrades - We test all new releases of SugarCRM as soon as they are available. Once we are comfortable that a new release is stable, we upgrade all customer production systems. Unless your SugarCRM system is highly customized, the cost of these upgrades is included in your monthly hosting charges.
• Inexpensive Optional Services - Epicom provides off-site back-up services, high-availability server configurations, hot standby servers, and a host of other optional services at very affordable prices. These services are typically expensive and difficult for individual customers to implement.

Because we have in-depth knowledge of SugarCRM and its hosting requirements, combined with significant economies of scale, we can typically host SugarCRM systems more efficiently and less expensively than companies can host in house.

Each of Epicom's CRM hosting options has a recommended maximum number of users. These are guidelines to be used in selecting the appropriate hosting option based on your organization's size. There are no absolute rules that specify the number of users that can be supported by each hosting option because other factors such as frequency of use and database size also affect system performance. That's why Epicom makes it easy to change between hosting options at anytime without additional one-time costs or penalties. We want you to always have the hosting option that best suits you needs as your business evolves and changes.

We don't believe in locking our hosting customers into long-term commitments so all hosting agreements are month to month. Customers typically pay by credit card at the beginning of each month. For customers that want to save some money we offer discounts for prepayment of 6-month and 12-month hosting agreements. Support agreement customers sign an annual support contract and are invoiced monthly for support services. We offer discounts from our normal support rates for customers who pre-pay their annual agreements at the beginning of the contract term.

That is not a problem, hours accrue for one month. So if you don't use all of your support hours this month, they will still be available for use next month.

Software as a Service (SaaS, typically pronounced 'sass') is a model of software deployment where an application is hosted as a service provided to customers across the Internet. By eliminating the need to install and run the application on the customer's own computer, SaaS alleviates the customer's burden of software maintenance, ongoing operation, and support. Costs to use the service become a continuous expense, rather than a single expense at time of purchase. Using SaaS also can conceivably reduce that up-front expense of software purchases, through less costly, on-demand pricing. The SaaS software vendor may host the application on its own web server, or this function may be handled by a third-party application service provider (ASP). This way, end users may reduce their investment on server hardware too. For additional information, see the Wikipedia.

A Business Logic Hook is a piece of custom application code that can be linked to SugarCRM as a way of customizing the application. SugarCRM has a defined set of events that take place as the application is used. When it encounters one of these events, Sugar checks to see if there is any custom code that must be executed before or after the event fires. Business logic hooks are a powerful way to customize SugarCRM because they provide an upgrade-save method for making complex customizations to the base Sugar application. When a new version or bug fix is released for Sugar, the application sees and preserves each business logic hook. Business logic hooks are far superior to modification of the SugarCRM base application code because code modifications are always at risk of being overwritten during the next application upgrade or patch.

Epicom provides an application snapshot service for Standard, Advanced, and Premium hosting plans. With this service, a complete snapshot of your SugarCRM application and database are taken every four hours and stored on your server. That way, if an accidental data loss takes place through the error of a user, your system can be restored to a point earlier in the day and the lost data recovered. We have found that the the majority of problems caused in CRM applications are not due to hardware failures. They are due to users accidentally deleting information from the system that is of critical importance. With Epicom's snapshot service, the risk of this type of data loss is greatly reduced. Four-Hour Snapshots

SugarCRM changed its pricing for all commercial products and added a new product in May 2009. All SugarCRM licenses now include hosting on the SugarCRM Open Cloud. Pricing is as follows:

• Sugar Express (Sugar Community Edition packaged with MS Office plug-ins) is available in two sizes:
  • $499 per year for 1-5 users.
  • $799 per year for up to 10 users.
• Sugar Professional
  • $360 per user per year
  • Minimum of 5 users
• Sugar Enterprise
  • $600 per user per year.
  • Minimum of 5 users

We use Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS (Long Term Support) on all of our server. This Linux distribution is stable, actively maintained, and well supported. Version 8.04 LTS will be supported by its creators until April 2013.