The return of Sugar

After a quiet period of about six months, Sugar CRM Inc. is back in the news. The provider of commercial open source customer relationship management software today announced the beta release of Sugar 4.5. Originally due to appear in June, Sugar delayed the release to polish it up, explained Sugar CRM chief executive officer John Roberts said.

Sugar 4.5 is touted by company PR as “one of the most substantial application updates since the company launched two years ago.” Sugar 4.5 features a few new functions such as personalized views, internationalization and support for Microsoft Windows Server products. Sugar 4.5 will also include full support for multibyte characters used in languages such as Chinese.

The result of five months of technical collaboration with Microsoft Corporation, Sugar 4.5 seeks to offer improved support for Microsoft’s internet information services active directory and Microsoft SQL Server. Sugar 4.5 uses AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) technology throughout the application, and AJAX is employed extensively within the redone Sugar Studio. Ajax technology is generally designed to make personalization easier.

Ajax, or asynchronous JavaScript and extensible markup language, is the collective term used to describe a group of software development tools and standards that assist Web applications in trying to match the efficacy of their desktop counterparts. Indeed, Roberts, clearly search for the correct words explained Sugar 4.5 with “We’ve completely AJAXed pretty much the entire user interface so you can drag and drop components to fit what makes sense for you as an individual.”

Though Sugar PR (and much media coverage) indicates that Sugar 4.5 is the eighth major release for the company in two years, it has been six months since the last major release and 4.5 is the first SugarCRM release since its partnership with Microsoft was announced earlier this year. SugarCRM provides commercial and free open-source versions of Sugar. With its commercial Professional and Enterprise versions, the vendor charges for technical support and a variety of services.

A hosted version of Sugar Professional costs from US $40 per user per month, while the on-premise version costs from US $239 per user per year. As for the future, SugarCRM hints at short-, medium- and long-term plans in the field. SugarCRM will also release a new Sugar distribution under the Microsoft community license beginning with Sugar 4.5, part of the Microsoft Shared Source Initiative, a program through which Microsoft shares source code.

The Windows distribution is the third optimized version of Sugar, following versions for the LAMP (an open-source Web development platform based on Linux, Apache, MySQL and programming languages PHP, Perl or Python) stack and Apple Computer’s Mac OS X. And here’s what’s not happening in the future: Roberts stressed over and over again in press coverage that Windows distribution of Sugar 4.5 does not mean the company is moving away from open-source. “We’re not leaving Linux,” said Roberts. “We’re big Linux supporters, but at the same time what’s really important is to listen to the requests of our community.

SQL server was a high priority.” SugarCRM ambitiously announced plans to keep their pace of releases regular, with a major software release promised every six to seven months. In the world according to Roberts, we could all be Sugar terminal cases: The company has plans to expand beyond the customer relationship management applications. Roberts suggested that Sugar 5.0, slated for December release, will include order-management functions and will augment existing CRM applications with features such as enhanced marketing automation.

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.