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Taking a page from the Salesforce.com playbook, SugarCRM has announced the availability of Sugar Community Edition on Amazon EC2 to provide CRM developers with an easy-to-deploy development environment in the cloud.
Sugar Community Edition is available now as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), which enables developers to access, test and develop Sugar code in a cloud-based environment provided by Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
Sugar Community Edition is an open source application framework in which corporate IT developers build highly customized CRM applications. The availability of Sugar Community Edition on Amazon EC2 combines the power and flexibility of Sugar Community Edition with the scalability and flexibility of the Amazon cloud platform. Amazon’s EC2 environment provides an “always on” cloud platform that enables developers to quickly provision and extend web applications such as Sugar Community Edition, without needing to manage local servers or other hardware.
“The Sugar Community Edition AMI on Amazon Web Services continues our goal of providing open CRM applications that run anywhere, in any environment,” said Clint Oram, co-founder and vice president of products at SugarCRM, in a statement. “Cloud-based development environments such as Amazon EC2 provide developers the same benefits of cloud computing that end-users enjoy today: anytime, anywhere access to a highly available platform at a minimal cost.”
“Hosted clouds are becoming a platform of choice for ISVs to provide organizations and developers with cloud-based access to their enterprise applications,” said Tim Hickernell, lead analyst for Info-Tech Research Group, in a statement. “When ISVs place versions of their business applications in the cloud, companies can exploit the rich and flexible environment offered by software-as-a-service architectures, either as a single application delivery choice or in conjunction with other delivery mechanisms the ISV supports, such on-premise implementations or locally controlled private clouds. CRM in particular is evolving towards hybrid application architectures, exploiting the best of every application delivery method,” Hickernell added.
Since its introduction in 2004, Sugar Community Edition has been downloaded over two million times and localized into more than 75 languages. More than 19,000 developers have created over 700 extensions for Sugar Forge www.sugarforge.org, SugarCRM’s community web site.
The Sugar Community Edition AMI is available today for developers at http://developer.amazonwebservices.com.