Tata Communications, a leading provider of enterprise data services,  announced that Tata Communications’ On-Demand CRM service is available immediately to organizations of all sizes in India. This marks the company’s entry into the fast growing software-as-a-service (SaaS) space and is an extension of its managed services portfolio. Tata Communications has signed a partnership agreement with SugarCRM, a leading provider of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, to provide its award-winning CRM applications as the basis for Tata’s entry as a SaaS provider. Since the beginning of this year, Tata Communications and SugarCRM have worked closely together on a joint pilot program to build a CRM service that meets the needs of businesses in India.

Building on its world class network, data center and managed hosting services, Tata Communications is bringing enterprises in India a single, end-to-end service to help companies manage their marketing programs in a cohesive manner, increase effectiveness of sales teams, and provide stronger tools to their customer support teams. With Tata’s On-Demand CRM offering, companies can get up and running quickly without having to invest in additional IT resources and can pay for the CRM service on a subscription model. The subscription service aligns with the growth and needs of individual businesses and delivers a cost-effective avenue for using CRM services. With Tata Communications’ pan India sales and support presence, and its SI partner eco-system, On-Demand CRM will help grow businesses as per the market needs.

“Tata Communications’ On-Demand CRM’s flexible Sales Force Automation module and customizable reporting has allowed us to align our processes to our ever changing business needs,” said Jaideep Chakrabarti of Future Netwings Solutions. “With personalized trainings and support from TCL, we have been able to maximize our investment by harnessing the value and the benefit immediately. From a ROI perspective, this has allowed us to track our customers’ requirement, evaluate sales funnels and productivity from day one.”

“We have seen strong customer demand for subscription based services especially from sectors like Contact Centers, Manufacturing and Pharmaceutical which require high sales, marketing and customer contact management. Also our experience as the number one provider of hosted MS Exchange services in India enables us to offer a robust and reliable service in this space. We are delighted to bring the award winning CRM solution from SugarCRM to our enterprise customers,” said Angira Agrawal, General Manager – SaaS & Enterprise Mobility, Tata Communications.

“After a successful pilot program, we are excited that Tata Communications has decided to make SugarCRM available to its customers,” said Jeff Campbell, vice president of worldwide sales for SugarCRM. “India is one of the fastest growing markets and we see tremendous demand for our CRM services as companies embrace on-demand software to stay competitive in the marketplace. We look forward to continuing our relationship with Tata Communications and helping its customers improve their business through effective customer relationship management.”

Tata Communications’ managed services portfolio now extends beyond network, infrastructure, security and collaboration services into the application space to enable them to transform the way they operate their businesses. On-Demand CRM, enables companies in India to more effectively manage their customer relationships and increase business effectiveness and profitability. This adds to the existing Hosted Business Messaging (based on Microsoft Exchange) that Tata Communications has been offering for the last three years, and will be part of the broader SaaS offerings, including Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS).

About SugarCRM

SugarCRM is the world's leading provider of commercial customer relationship management (CRM) software. Founded as an open source project in 2004, SugarCRM applications have been downloaded over five million times and currently serve over 500,000 users in 75 languages. Over 5,000 customers have chosen SugarCRM's On-Site and Cloud Computing services over lock-in based, proprietary alternatives. In the last year, SugarCRM has been recognized for its customer success and product innovation by CRM Magazine, InfoWorld, Customer Interaction Solutions and Intelligent Enterprise.
Website: www.sugarcrm.com

About Tata Communications

Tata Communications is a leading global provider of a new world of communications. With a leadership position in emerging markets, Tata Communications leverages its advanced solutions capabilities and domain expertise across its global and pan-India network to deliver managed solutions to multi-national enterprises, service providers and Indian consumers.

The Tata Global Network includes one of the most advanced and largest submarine cable networks, a Tier-1 IP network, with connectivity to more than 200 countries across 400 PoPs, and nearly 1 million square feet of data center and collocation space worldwide.

Tata Communications’ depth and breadth of reach in emerging markets includes leadership in Indian enterprise data services, leadership in global international voice, and strategic investments in operators in South Africa (Neotel), Sri Lanka (Tata Communications Lanka Limited), Nepal (United Telecom Limited), and subject to approval by the Chinese government, China (China Enterprise Communications)

Tata Communications Limited is listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange and the National Stock Exchange of India and its ADRs are listed on the New York Stock Exchange. (NYSE:TCL)

www.tatacommunications.com

Forward-looking and cautionary statements

Certain words and statements in this release concerning Tata Communications and its prospects, and other statements, including those relating to Tata Communications’ expected financial position, business strategy, the future development of Tata Communications’ operations, and the general economy in India, are forward-looking statements. Such statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, including financial, regulatory and environmental, as well as those relating to industry growth and trend projections, which may cause actual results, performance or achievements of Tata Communications, or industry results, to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The important factors that could cause actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from such forward-looking statements include, among others, failure to increase the volume of traffic on Tata Communications’ network; failure to develop new products and services that meet customer demands and generate acceptable margins; failure to successfully complete commercial testing of new technology and information systems to support new products and services, including voice transmission services; failure to stabilize or reduce the rate of price compression on certain of the company’s communications services; failure to integrate strategic acquisitions and changes in government policies or regulations of India and, in particular, changes relating to the administration of Tata Communications’ industry; and, in general, the economic, business and credit conditions in India. Additional factors that could cause actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from such forward-looking statements, many of which are not in Tata Communications’ control, include, but are not limited to, those risk factors discussed in Tata Communications’ various filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. These filings are available at www.sec.gov. Tata Communications is under no obligation to, and expressly disclaims any obligation to, updates or alters its forward-looking statements.

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SugarCRM is enhancing the mobile capabilities of its popular open-source customer relationship management application and making it easier for sales teams to use the software to collaborate.

The enhancements are part of the SugarCRM 5.5 beta the company released Thursday to the SugarCRM community. The final version is expected sometime in a few weeks or possibly a month, depending on the feedback users provide.

The software's new Mobile Studio Editor toolset lets developers customize SugarCRM for mobile devices, providing prebuilt views, fields and layouts for the application modules designated for mobile use, according to the company. A business, for example, could tailor the system to provide field support agents with a streamlined view of the application's customer support module.

The new "dynamic teams" capability lets users add multiple individuals to a CRM record for collaborating on large-scale projects. With that feature, according to SugarCRM, a sales manager could assign an executive, a customer advocate, professional services workers and others to an account rather than just an individual sales representative.

Other new features, including an enhanced Web services framework, make it easier to integrate data from outside sources -- e-commerce systems such as Amazon (NSDQ:AMZN)'s Flexible Payment Services, for example -- with SugarCRM. The beta application also offers improved password-management capabilities for both users and security administrators.

The beta release is available at www.sugarforge.org. SugarCRM is also developing release 6.0 of its application, which is slated to debut around the end of the year or early in 2010, said Martin Schneider, product marketing director.

The new release shows that SugarCRM's development work continues uninterrupted despite the sudden resignation of founding CEO John Roberts on May 7. Board member Larry Augustin is serving as interim CEO while the company searches for a permanent replacement for Roberts

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Rails 2.3 is almost ready for release, but this package is so stock full of amazing new stuff that we’re making dutifully sure that everything works right before we call it official.

So please help us do thorough testing of this release candidate. Lots of the underpinnings changed. Especially the move to Rack. So we need solid testing and will probably have a slightly longer than average release candidate phase to account for that.

But boy will it be worth it. This is one of the most substantial upgrades to Rails in a very long time. A brief rundown of the top hitters:

• Templates: Allows your new skeleton Rails application to be built your way with your default stack of gems, configs, and more.
• Engines: Share reusable application pieces complete with routes that Just Work, models, view paths, and the works.
• Rack: Rails now runs on Rack which gives you access to all the middleware goodness.
• Metal: Write super fast pieces of optimized logic that routes around Action Controller.
• Nested forms: Deal with complex forms so much easier.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. We’ve put together a complete guide for the Rails 2.3 release notes with much more information.

You can install the release candidate with:

gem install rails --source http://gems.rubyonrails.org

Enjoy, report the bugs, and let’s get Rails 2.3 final out the door soon.

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