SugarCRM Cloud Computing Strategy

I don't often have the chance to speak with the folks of SurgarCRM. So, it was a bit surprising to have Sugar reach out to me to discuss the company's Cloud Computing strategy and present a recent example of that strategy in action — an initiative SugarCRM and IBM have been jointly working on to offer Sugar's Software as a Service (SaaS) offering on IBM's SmartCloud Enterprise cloud computing platform.

SugarCRM's Cloud Strategy

Sugar has long offered its technology as a service offering and as an open source software project. This offered customers the choice of using either Sugar's IT infrastructure or their own. Sugar realizes that customers want more choice, higher levels of security, reliability and availability. To that end, Sugar is engaged in developing packaged versions of its technology for different Cloud Computing service environments. One of the first examples to become public was the SugarCRM/IBM initiative.

We can expect to see SugarCRM's application appear in other major cloud computing environments in the future. This may mean migrating the application to other processor architectures and database engines.

SugarCRM and IBM SmartCloud Enterprise

Sugar and IBM have been working together to make SugarCRM's customer relationship management software available for IBM's SmartCloud Enterprise cloud computing service.

• SugarCRM's application had to execute on IBM's SmartCloud Enterprise, this meant running the software on IBM Power architecture systems.
• SugarCRM had to add support for IBM's DB2 database
• SugarCRM had to integrate its application with IBM's Cognos, LotusLive, Cast Iron and other IBM applications

Working together, SugarCRM and IBM are able to offer high levels of security, reliability and availability. They also are able to offer service level agreements (SLAs) to customers.

Snapshot analysis

SugarCRM has long been one of the star examples of a Software as a Service offering. Although Sugar's application was available in an open source form, many companies wanted the integration and packaging work done for them. In other words, they wanted a service offering not a computer science project.

It is clear that Sugar has heard these comments and developed a strategy to migrate and test its application in a number of Cloud environments. It has also turned the strategy into projects and has delivered its application to folks wishing to use IBM's SmartCloud Enterprise service around the world.

Good job Sugar! I know that many of your customers today and future prospects will be happy to learn that your software is available for their favorite cloud computing service as they become available in the future.

Good job IBM! Your customers are likely to be happy to learn that SugarCRM is now available as a service offering in the SmartCloud Enteprise environment.

Update

Chris Bucholtz, Analyst Relations, SugarCRM, reached out to correct a few mistakes in this article.  Here's what he had to say:

Thanks for your description of our efforts with IBM, Dan! It's a very nice bit of evidence that we're on the road to delivering enterprise-ready solutions – and the goal's to offer that level of choice and quality to all our users.

In the piece, you said IBM was the first such cloud partner; in reality, we're already available on Amazon EC2, Rackspace, OpSource and Microsoft's Azure, and we're getting ready for Red Hat's cloud offering (a natural for an open source application!). We're already executing on that goal of offering a cloud choice.

Thanks, Chris, for setting the record straight!