SugarCRM, a provider of commercial open source CRM software, has launched Sugar Express, a low-cost, on-demand CRM that runs on SugarCRM’s global on-demand computing platform – the Sugar Open Cloud.

Like Sugar CRM’s other products, Sugar Express delivers sales, marketing and support features, complete with Sugar Plug-Ins for Microsoft Office and access to SugarCRM Customer Support. Sugar Express is offered as an annual subscription at $499 for up to five users or $799 for up to ten users per year.

Sugar Express runs completely on the Sugar Open Cloud, which is a global cloud computing platform for managing SugarCRM and other applications and extensions. Sugar’s vision for the Open Cloud is that it provides customers with choice and portability (the option to run on Sugar or other clouds), flexibility (supports public, private, hosted applications ) and interoperability ( it is all open source)

The open cloud allows unified pricing for all three of SugarCRM’s commercial products – Express, Professional and Enterprise – regardless of deployment option. Sugar Express will be $7 per user per month, Sugar Professional will be offered at $30 per user per month and Sugar Enterprise will be offered at $50 per user per month. Upon purchase, customers gain immediate access to their Sugar products on the Sugar Open Cloud along with a download key to deploy products in-house or in other cloud environments.

It seems like Sugar Express is a nifty deal for small businesses which was an application has sales, marketing and support features but is cost-effective and can be run on other clouds.

With the economic meltdown in full swing, Roberts sees an opportunity for what he calls the Open Cloud, where a combination of unique value services and squeezing cost out will ride the cloud computing wave. As he pointed out in a conversation embedded below, open source has always been about the cloud, a vast army of disconnected programmers iteratively building a platform of free services with the kind of commercial open source strategy popularized by JBoss and MySQL.

Sun’s $1 billion plus acquisition of MySQL may not be in the cards for SugarCRM, says Roberts, who is betting on an IPO two years down the road when the crisis lifts. In the meantime, he’s bankrolling ongoing development of over 600 projects, or modules, via the company’s 4500 paying customers. He doesn’t attack Salesforce by name, but his frequent messaging about lock in via proprietary services is as unmistakable as Marc Benioff’s frequent jousts with Microsoft.

With the release of its Sugar Cloud Connectors framework in December 2008 and connectors for Hoover’s, Jigsaw, LinkedIn, and new additions Zoominfo and our own Crunchbase, more and more Web services endpoints are now being stitched together into a quilt of on-demand data services. Roberts suggests that there’s plenty of room for the various flavors of open and commercial. Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, who keynotes Tuesday’s session, is counting on Roberts being right.

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SugarCRM started as open source project on Sourceforge, and the company still maintains a fully open source version. Its revenue relies on professional editions and through the provision of support. Total funding to date for SugarCRM now stands at approx. $41 million.

Online jewelry store Ice.com has raised $47 million in “new venture capital” from Polaris Venture Partners. The online retailer opened its doors at the tail of the original web boom in 2001 and has grown to annual sales of $83.4 million.

Under the deal, Polaris managing general partner Alan Spoon will take a seat on the Ice.com board.

(via PEHub/ Internetretailer)