SuiteASSURED is SuiteCRM for organisations who operate compliance driven environments or who require additional software assurances or intellectual property warranties that are not provided with SuiteCRM.

SuiteASSURED has been developed to provide surety to enterprise-class customers and other large organisations installing, customising and driving value from the open source SuiteCRM software application.

The launch of SuiteASSURED has generated some confusion and even some controversy within the community. We would like to provide further assistance and clarity by providing answers to a series of community members’ questions.

What is SuiteASSURED?

SuiteASSURED is separately maintained from SuiteCRM. Although they share the same core codebase, some of SuiteCRM’s features identified as insufficiently mature or experimental are removed. SuiteASSURED also undergoes separate internal and third party security and penetration testing. SuiteASSURED has specific guarantees, warranties and indemnities included that are not available to SuiteCRM users.

So are you moving SuiteCRM to a freemium model?

No. SuiteASSURED has no added features or significant differences in the code from SuiteCRM. Quite the contrary: SuiteCRM will contain some bleeding edge features which will not be included in SuiteASSURED. SuiteCRM will continue to be at the cutting edge of our development roadmap.

But it sounds like you are going down the SugarCRM route and you’ll gradually abandon SuiteCRM…

It is worth restating what we have said on numerous occasions: SuiteCRM is and always will be an open source community project. Every line of code published by the project will be open source. We are completely committed to open source and SuiteCRM is at the cutting edge of that commitment.

What we are doing is very different from SugarCRM. Both SuiteCRM and SuiteASSURED share the same code base. There are no extra modules or functions in SuiteASSURED.

SuiteCRM users will benefit from SuiteASSURED in profound ways. Any defects identified during third party penetration and security testing of SuiteASSURED will be up-streamed to SuiteCRM. The additional revenues from SuiteASSURED will enable the project to develop more and improved code all of which will be released to the community in SuiteCRM.

You speak of contracts. Are you closing the source?

No. The source code of both versions is, and will continue to be distributed under an AGPL open source license.

Won’t this split the community?

We hope the community will understand that by offering a discretely maintained version, with additional security, testing and warranties required by compliance driven organisations, that we can introduce SuiteCRM into a sector currently dominated by proprietary vendors and expand our client base.

With more clients, come more users, more resources, more revenue and more developers. This will ultimately help us, the SuiteCRM community, to grow.

Are there any more advantages for SuiteCRM?

Yes, many more. SuiteASSURED comes with Long Term Support (LTS) releases, and that means SuiteCRM will also benefit from LTS. An LTS will follow an 18 month release cycle and provide critical bug fixes, security fixes and other defect resolutions.

Any major fixes or security patches implemented for SuiteASSURED as a result of security and penetration testing will also be up-streamed into SuiteCRM.

If you would like to know more about SuiteASSURED, there is a complete breakdown of what it is and the warranties it provides on the information page.

Got another question regarding SuiteASSURED? Send it to us marketing@suitecrm.com and we will get back to you as soon as possible (or we will post it on this blog).