Businesses today require powerful market intelligence to stay competitive. Even the smallest niche in the competitive modern marketplace often has serious competition coming from organizations who are well versed in data analysis and adept at putting it to use to gain a competitive edge. Some business owners try to hack it without having top-flight analytics at their disposal. But more often than not, such businesses come to find out that this is a major mistake. So what is a business without the budget for a big-name CRM platform supposed to do? Luckily, not all CRM solutions need to cost you a quarter of your budget. Sugar CRM is one of the best open-source CRM platforms available today. With all of the capabilities of programs costing thousands more, Sugar CRM is able to begin optimizing sales, marketing and customer service within hours of being deployed. And it operates 100 percent in the cloud, making it fully scalable.