Click2try has announced the signing of an agreement with Estrasol of Guadalajara, Mexico, to become an authorized click2try consulting partner. Company officials say it's a non-exclusive agreement whereby Estarsol will provide custom apps based on SugarCRM, among others, to the catalog.

 

Click2try is basically a community site where users can play around with Open Source software before adoption. Estrasol CRM will be offered, as will access to Estrasol premium services in consulting, customization, support, and training.

Mario Grech, click2try CEO, said the idea is to make Estrasol more widely-known as "an international consulting organization" for CRM or ERP implementations. Steve Hayward, click2try VP of Engineering, says the reason for the site is having a place where people can "evaluate applications, and start using them immediately."

The site lets visitors "freely try" any of over 40 applications "without installing anything onto their local machines," company officials explain, adding that "a visitor can have sophisticated applications like SugarCRM (News - Alert) and Openbravo up and running literally in seconds."

 

In late April, TMC reported that open source CRM software provider SugarCRM announced Sugar Express, described by company officials as "addressing SugarCRM open source users’ demand for an affordable product that runs on SugarCRM’s on-demand computing platform, the Sugar Open Cloud." 

Sugar Express provides core sales, marketing and support features, Sugar Plug-Ins for Microsoft (News - Alert) Office and access to SugarCRM Customer Support. Platform functionality includes the Module Builder to create custom modules and Cloud Connectors, "to integrate third-party data services from companies such as Hoover’s and Jigsaw," company officials say. 

“For all of its promise, the cloud computing movement is in danger of becoming yet another mousetrap to lock in customers to proprietary vendors,” says John Roberts (News - Alert), CEO of SugarCRM.

In March, Martin Schneider, Director of Product Marketing for SugarCRM, told TMC's Stefania Viscusi that SugarCRM "recognizes that the cloud is analogous to open source at its roots. A major aspect of the cloud is that it can enable faster, cheaper innovation when it comes to software. A developer, or team of programmers, can leverage cloud-based development platforms to build new and innovative applications from scratch based on open source components such as PHP. Now, these developers can complete projects without ever meeting - saving time and resources leveraging the cloud."