SugarCRM, the open source CRM company founded in 2004, has announced the release of their latest version, Sugar 6. With this release, SugarCRM is trying to focus on making it easier and flexible for users to use CRM systems. In fact, many users are completely lost when it comes to using CRM. The complexity and lack of good user experience are considered to be the main reasons for this. This release focusses on substantially improving the user experience by offering a clean, bold look with new buttons and icons that allow users to perform tasks more easily while increasing the information density of each screen. In short, the idea is to make the CRM be flexible and convenient to users needs than users spending time to understand the UI and the complexities associated with it. They have achieved this by focusing on the user friendliness of their menu bars.

This new release also brings more social aspects to SugarCRM. Now Sugar users can leverage information from social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn and other data sources from inside the CRM. This makes SugarCRM more social than before, positioning themselves to compete with other sCRM offerings. This release also has support for more cloud providers making it easy to deploy SugarCRM on the cloud.

 SugarCRM also announced partnerships with two cloud service providers, a topic that may be of some interest to Cloud Ave audience. At the Microsoft Worldwide Partners Conference at Washington DC, SugarCRM announced that Sugar 6 is now certified for deployment on Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform. What it essentially means is that one can install SugarCRM on Windows Azure and it will work as promised without any issues. This increases the number of cloud partners for SugarCRM. Interestingly, SugarCRM has embraced the cloud era with a different approach from companies like Salesforce.com, Zoho CRM (disclaimer: Zoho is the exclusive sponsor of this blog but it is my independent opinion), etc.. While the latter companies take a multi-tenant SaaS approach, SugarCRM is trying to push for cloud apps instead. They certify SugarCRM with different cloud vendors and when it is installed on these clouds, it will work flawlessly. I asked Martin Schneider, Senior Director, Communications at SugarCRM, if SugarCRM will scale out in the Azure environment like the underlying cloud platform, he said it will scale seamlessly without any efforts on the user's side. He also pointed out that the users of SugarCRM on Azure can use either MySQL or SQL Azure.