SugarCRM, a provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, has announced Softbank Technology has signed an agreement to distribute Sugar solutions in Japan. The new partnership will service a broad range of customer needs by offering ASP services that use Sugar.

 

"We are constantly looking for ways to improve the service we give our customers. We looked at Salesforce, SugarCRM and Siebel, and ultimately decided to go with SugarCRM because of its superior functionality in relation to cost," said Norikazu Ishikawa, President & CEO, Softbank.

 

Ishikawa said the company "saw the value of having access to Sugar's source code, which allows us to make specific customizations to meet our needs and those of our customers."

 

Softbank sells a range of products and services, including support for e-business operations and products for the design, construction, operation and maintenance of various types of networks and systems. The company has also deployed a 100-user subscription of Sugar Enterprise within its customer call center.

 

SugarCRM continues to increase its global presence -- over 75 language packs and 400 extensions are currently available for SugarCRM's global community of more than 2,000 commercial customers.   

 

In January 2007, SugarCRM announced a strategic partnership with CareBrains, the Japan-based provider of open source software applications and support. Softbank joins SugarCRM and CareBrains as a J-Gold Partner to provide its partners and customers access to SugarCRM partner program benefits, which include special partner Japanese language packs, resell rights to Sugar commercial editions, and fully localized sales and marketing tools.

 

Last month SugarCRM's beta of Sugar Community Edition 5.0 was made available for download and testing by the Sugar community. Sugar Community Edition 5.0 is being released under the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPLv3), a free software license published by the Free Software Foundation.

   

The Sugar community -- and hey, you know who you are -- is comprised of over 10,000 developers located in five continents who have already contributed more than 400 CRM extensions based on the core Sugar code on http://www.sugarforge.org.

 

The adoption of GPLv3 was "welcomed by the Sugar community," SugarCRM officials say, and "will enable faster development cycles, more code contributions and additional beta testing feedback, which ultimately increases the quality of CRM."

   

"We have worked closely with SugarCRM to ensure that their Sugar Community Edition applies GPLv3 correctly," said Richard M. Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation. "We believe it sets the standard for how enterprise applications can take advantage of the benefits the license provides."

 

At the end of July SugarCRM announced the upcoming release of Sugar Community Edition 5.0 will be licensed under the new Version 3 of the GNU General Public License.

 

The GPL is the most widely used free and open source license in the market.