Infratel, a provider of call center products and services, and SugarCRM (News - Alert), a customer relationship management (CRM) company, announced their alliance to enable small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) to affordably add telephony solutions to their CRM platform.

“This partnership is great news for SMBs that, in the past, may have lacked the budgets to compete with larger companies that have access to expensive enterprise solutions,” said Jim Southwell, general manager of Infratel, in a statement. “Our two companies are creating a level playing field by providing SMBs more affordable access to best in class CRM tools.”

Besides its call center platform, Infratel is planning to offer full social media integration in the year ahead. The social media integration is expected to enable agents to recognize user trends and sentiments. This added layer of information will give tools to agents to circumvent problems and reward brand loyalty.

“Businesses simply need to connect and engage with their customers regardless of their size or level of resources,” said Clint Oram, co-founder and CTO of SugarCRM, in a statement. “Partnering with Infratel allows our companies to provide a best-in-class, complete contact center and CRM solution to an extremely large set of businesses which were previously locked-out of this type of robust functionality due to cost or complexity concerns.”

Company officials claim that SugarCRM applications have been downloaded more than seven million times. The app serves more than 700,000 end users in 80 languages. Almost 7,000 customers selected SugarCRM's On-Site and Cloud Computing services.

Recently, SugarCRM and BitNami announced their association to provide SugarCRM as part of BitNami Cloud Hosting. With the BitNami and SugarCRM partnership, BitNami becomes SugarCRM's preferred method to deploy its software on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.