Open source customer relationship management, or “CRM,” provider SugarCRM and Germany-based Open-Xchange, an open source groupware provider have joined forces to integrate data from SugarCRM (News - Alert) and Open-Xchange collaboration software. 

The new system will allow users to gather and aggregate data from their social network profiles such as Facebook (News - Alert), LinkedIn and Xing, as well as their SugarCRM application, to store it in an Open-Xchange address book as well as share it with others. 

Additionally, any user information can be moved to the SugarCRM application as desired.

The SugarCRM data imported into Open-Xchange can be accessed from smartphones, or published to the Internet. 

According to Clint Oram, vice president of products and co-founder, SugarCRM, there is incredible potential for data integration, a type of social CRM module. The focus of the IT industry is now shifting towards how data can be shared among users to increase knowledge among groups of people.

Open-Xchange offers open source collaboration software for both on-premise and software-as-a-service, or “SaaS (News - Alert),” implementations using exactly the same source code. It leverages a data format that is based on work at microformats.org, for data import and export.

Company officials said the Open-Xchange Micro Format lets users import their data from social networks and other software applications, manage it, and export it back to other supporters of the format; whether those are hosted/SaaS, on-premise or a combination of those.

System integrators and resellers can partner with service providers to offer hosted Open-Xchange to their customer base without the upfront investments required to set up a complex and secure hosting infrastructure. SaaS providers can benefit from resellers' and system integrators' local and regional customer base and in-depth technical and consulting expertise. 

“SugarCRM is the first software to build on the social networking capabilities in Open-Xchange, which opens the potential for a whole new class of integrated solutions,” Juergen Geck, Open-Xchange CTO, said. “Social Open-Xchange in combination with SugarCRM will create an ecosystem of data that spans many social networks and software programs.”