Free Sugar

SugarCRM Inc., a commercial open source customer relationship management software provider, today announced the availability of SugarExchange, an ambitious attempt to create a global marketplace of Sugar community-built applications and extensions for SugarCRM end-users and administrators. SugarExchange is located at http://www.sugarexchange.com.

Said SugarCRM chairman / CEO John Roberts, “SugarExchange is a logical extension of the commercial open source business model.” Indeed. Not to mention a big addition to the SaaS world. As of now, more than 60 applications from SugarExchange can be downloaded and installed at no charge, and over 40 more are available for sale.

Sugar is also offering some heady guarantees: that all products are used and tested by the open source community at SugarForge prior to gaining SugarExchange production approval, and that all extensions and applications to be offered on the SugarExchange marketplace will be approved to work in production instances of SugarCRM.

The new marketplace seeks to complement SugarForge.org, Sugar’s own developer collaboration environment with 6,000 registered developers and 250 freely-available applications and extensions. “SugarExchange gives developers the opportunity to write great software and get paid for their efforts,” said Val Cassidy, CTO of Xoetrope, an independent software vendor. And that’s a nice thing.

The growing popularity of SugarCRM is oft-mentioned among the press corps, with downloads doubling from 400,000 to 800,000 in six months and a Microsoft partnership highlighting its growth. Since that time, Sugar Open Source has been downloaded over 800,000 times in 41 languages. More than 5,000 developers have contributed over 220 extensions to a community of over 15,000 members. SugarCRM today serves over 800 commercial customers.

SugarCRM is a provider of commercial open source customer relationship management software for companies of all sizes, offering deployment options in on-demand, on-premise and appliance-based formats.