SugarCRM Will Offer CRM Apps on The Windows Azure Cloud
This week, SugarCRM announced its CRM products would be the latest applications to join the Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud, thereby offering customers and resellers the benefit of real-time scalability, accessibility, and on-demand foundation.
SugarCRM’s recently ppointed CEO Larry Augustin is quoted in the press release saying that Windows Azure goes “well beyond the simple hosted infrastructure that most service providers offer today,” and noted that the new service is key to the Sugar Open Cloud, facilitating the deployment of Sugar products to any location.
The process behind making SugarCRM applications available on the cloud only took a few weeks—this speedy turnaround time is attributed to the strong native support Windows Azure delivers for PHP, which is the programming language in which Sugar is written.
There have recently been warnings from Azure competitors and others that releasing Windows Azure developments could result in that customer being locked into the system. Still, the executives at SugarCRM seem not to be worried about this. One potential hazard that could arise, however, is that channel partners hosting SugarCRM on their own may see competition from the Azure cloud, but only time will tell.
SplendidCRM is also available for Azure. But as a native C# .NET application, you might be able to leverage SplendidCRM to get a free Azure account when you signup for Microsoft BizSpark.