Novell announced on Monday that SugarCRM is now a partner in Novells Market Start program, which is designed to provide back-office software for small and midsize businesses.
SugarCRM Inc.s Sugar Suite is Market Starts first CRM (customer relationship management) product. This is part of Novell Inc.s plan to engage SMBs with its Linux line, and, in particular, its NLSBS (Novell Linux Small Business Suite.)
Other ISVs (independent software vendors) involved with Market Start are JBoss Inc., Siebel Systems Inc. and MySQL AB.
Sugar Suite will run on SLES 9 (SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9) and related operating systems like NLSBS and Open Enterprise Server.
In addition to working to integrate Sugar Suite with SLES, Novell and SugarCRM will promote Sugar Suite through joint marketing efforts.
Sugar Suite will also be made available through select Novell channel partners.
“We selected SugarCRM for our Market Start program because they provide a proven open-source and open-standards alternative in the small and medium-sized business marketplace,” John Beuchert, director of the Market Start program at Novell, said in a statement.
SugarCRM CEO John Roberts said, “Our participation in the program will allow us to reach a much wider audience by leveraging Novells brand and credibility to demonstrate the value of open-source applications in the enterprise.”
Sugar Open Source Edition is available for free download. The more advanced Sugar Professional Edition and new Sugar Enterprise Edition are available for $239 and $449 per user per year, respectively, including 12 months of application updates; installation assistance; trouble ticketing; global weekday e-mail-based technical support; and full production support including patch and fix distributions.
The enterprise edition also supports the Oracle 9i and MySQL relational databases.