SugarCRM announces CRM apps on Win Azure

LOS ANGELES, USA: SugarCRM, provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software has announced that it will offer its CRM applications on Windows Azure to enable its customers.

“With Windows Azure, Microsoft has built a true cloud computing platform going well beyond the simple hosted infrastructure that most service providers offer today,” said Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM.

The process for making SugarCRM applications available on Microsoft Windows Azure was simple and straightforward, taking just a couple weeks of development time. This rapid implementation period was enabled by the strong native support the Microsoft Azure platform delivers for PHP, the programming language in which Sugar is written.

Doug Hauger, general manager of Windows Azure at Microsoft Corp said, “The ease by which SugarCRM was able to offer its CRM services demonstrates how the openness of the Windows Azure platform allowed it to deliver Web applications using its tools of choice.”

According to press release, Windows Azure is an Internet-scale cloud services platform that is hosted in Microsoft data centers to provide an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used separately or together.

It further added, SugarCRM provides CRM cloud applications designed to run in any computing environment, including cloud platforms such as Windows Azure, partner clouds provided by SugarCRM partners such as BT and Tata Communications or in private clouds managed directly by SugarCRM customers.