Last week Microsoft included SugarCRM’s Community Edition as a free download in the Windows Web App Gallery. SugarCRM, a popular open source CRM platform, is one of 8 applications added to the gallery since its inception four months ago.
The Community Edition is SugarCRM’s free service offering that provides a variety of sales, customer support, and marketing features. Complementing the core feature set are module building tools that allow for the development of custom applications and integration. The community edition is said to have approximately 85% the functionality contained in the company’s premium offerings Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise, and has grown to become one of the more popular CRM applications in the market with a reported 55,000 companies employing the service.
SugarCRM has operated as a Microsoft partner since 2006, and since then has become a large component of Microsoft’s recent open source strategy. Microsoft has recently expressed an uncharacteristic interest in getting open source software running on the Windows platform, and has thus embraced the idea of hosting open source applications on the Windows Server. The idea seems to be that, by encouraging open source software vendors to adopt interoperability with Windows, Microsoft can reduce demand for the rivaling Linux OS.
The SugarCRM community is set for further growth with the its inclusion in the Windows Web App Gallery, and it will be interesting to see if its success encourages more open source vendors to port their software to the Windows platform.