SugarCRM Buys Stitch, Startup Mobile Sales Productivity Developer

SugarCRM, a Salesforce.com rival, has acquired Stitch, a San Francisco-based developer of mobile apps for sales personnel to monitor and manage accounts, co-founded in 2013 by ex-Salesforce executives.

Neither company disclosed terms of the deal. Chatter about Stitch’s future began in earnest last week when the company put out a memo to customers that it intended to shutter its service on March 6, although no mention was made at the time of a sale, as TechCrunch reported.

With the deal SugarCRM gains not only Stitch’s technology but also its key personnel as co-founder Somrat Niyogi will join as an advisor and mobile engineering staff also will come along. SugarCRM will occupy Stitch’s San Francisco headquarters in addition to its main base in Cupertino, CA.

Using analytics technology, Stitch’s app helps salespeople sift through email and cloud-based documents to find useful information, make customized recommendations and uncover new sales opportunities.

“We’ve made Sugar an indispensable tool for customer-facing employees,” said Larry Augustin, SugarCRM chief executive. “Sugar gives them the right information, when they need it, even before they ask. Incorporating Stitch will make Sugar an even smarter, better-informed customer relationship management system, and put information at mobile users’ fingertips no matter where they are.”

Here are some snippets from Stitch’s customer memo last week, as posted by TechCrunch, which got its hands on the document last week.

“We’re proud of the products and technologies we built. And we’re grateful for your support. At every turn, your feedback helped to shape the development of Stitch, and we could not have done this without you. Thank you for making Stitch part of your daily workflow.

However, today, we are at the end of this chapter for Stitch. We believe strongly in our vision for our product, but we know we need more resources to fully execute on our vision. We can do more with more resources and data, and ultimately we can help more people work smarter in areas beyond sales. Intelligent software is the future—more automation, more productivity, more results.

We will be discontinuing the Stitch App in its current form as of Friday, March 6, 2015…Our team and technology will live on in new forms. We are excited and determined to continue to apply intelligence at the intersection of CRM, email and calendar data to help shape the future of customer relationship management. Stay tuned for more details in the coming days.”