This morning SugarCRM's going to announce the availability of SugarExchange, a marketplace of Sugar community-built applications and extensions for SugarCRM end-users and administrators.

Taking a page from salesforce.com's playbook, SugarExchange will offer production-ready community extensions as well as Sugar packages (please call them "cubes," please please please) and components to meet all the needs of a Sugar implementation. 

The applications available on SugarExchange "benefit from the active community of open source developers on SugarForge.org," according to SugarCRM officials.  These applications are also approved for deployment by SugarCRM, Inc.

SugarExchange showcases community-built products pre-approved by SugarCRM for production deployments. When it's officially announced, customers will be able to download and install more than 60 applications from SugarExchange at no charge. 

More than 40 products are available for sale. Customers can choose the product they want by using the SugarExchange ratings and popularity indicators that provide direct feedback from the Sugar community.

• Lead and contact management extensions from Asertiva, ContactGrabber and CarouselCRM

• eCommerce and Web self-service integrations with OsCommerce and Mambo

• Email response and email management from ZuckerMail and JRabbit

• Integration and migration from Jitterbit and Contact Capture

• Forecasting and reporting extensions from JUMP Technologies and JasperReports

About a week ago SugarCRM, which likes to call itself "the world's leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management," has announced a collaboration with software as a service vendor WebEx where Sugar Professional will be available via the new WebEx Connect application grid.

Sugar Professional is SugarCRM's commercial open source CRM application, serving "more than 800 customers in over 40 languages," company officials claim.

Sugar Professional provides a single view of customer interactions across sales, marketing and service, as well as campaign management, opportunity tracking, account management, sales forecasting and customer support capabilities, with reporting and collaboration tools.

"The future of software is based on open applications integrated into a single service," John Roberts, chairman and CEO, SugarCRM is fond of saying.

Sugar Professional will become one of the many applications users will be able to access through their personal WebEx Connect workspace and the WebEx Connect grid of partner applications.

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims’ columnist page.