SugarCRM serves up Microsoft support

Open-source startup offers sweeter Windows integration

SugarCRM is due to release version 4.5 of its commercial open-source customer relationship management (CRM) software next week at the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco, introducing support for Windows servers.

The support follows the announcement earlier this year of a collaborative development agreement with Microsoft. The fruits of that pact will be seen in tighter integration with IIS, Active Directory and SQL Server, the firm said.

The addition of the Microsoft support should give Sugar more sway with enterprises by offering a more palatable combination of open-source and traditional commercial software for risk-averse buyers that might balk at the prospect of a broader reliance on open-source products.

Elsewhere in the release, Sugar is edging closer to the feature sets of veteran enterprise products with broader international support, user-defined page views, a self-service portal and more granular sales forecasting.

Two-year-old Sugar is making a significant name for itself having picked up over 600 paying customers including multimedia content creation software developer Avid and security firm InterAct Public Safety Systems. The 65-staff firm’s executive team includes ex-managers from eCRM pioneers such as E.piphany and Broadvision.

Supporters of Sugar praise its usability and low cost, as well as the multiplicity of deployment options. Sugar offers on-premises and on-demand services in Professional and premium-priced Enterprise options, as well as the Sugar Cube server appliance that is pre-packaged with its software.

Experts believe that after a spate of mergers and acquisitions and the rise of on-demand vendors, there could be room for a newcomer to make a splash in the CRM sector.

“Sugar is up and coming and this release will [appeal to] the many companies that live and breathe Microsoft,” said David Bradshaw of analyst firm Ovum. “CRM is still a market that’s got legs and there’s a lot of change going on. There’s room for a worthy new player and open source might be the way to thrive.”