In a bid to provide CRM developers with an easy-to-deploy development environment in the cloud, open source CRM software provider SugarCRM (News - Alert) has announced the availability of Sugar Community Edition on Amazon EC2.

According to officials with the company, this new availability brings forth the “most scalable and flexible cloud platforms available today” for developers.

This announcement, Tim Hickernell, lead analyst for Info-Tech Research Group also said, is in line with today’s ISVs who are looking to provide organizations and developers with cloud-based access to their enterprise applications.

“When ISVs place versions of their business applications in the cloud, companies can exploit the rich and flexible environment offered by software-as-a-service architectures, either as a single application delivery choice or in conjunction with other delivery mechanisms the ISV supports, such on-premise implementations or locally controlled private clouds. CRM in particular is evolving towards hybrid application architectures, exploiting the best of every application delivery method,” Hickernell said.

Sugar Community Edition is now available as an Amazon Machine Image, or “AMI”.

Clint Oram, vice president of product management and co-founder of SugarCRM told TMCnet in an interview that this also provides a quick and easy way for developers to start testing and developing a product like Sugar.

“Cloud platforms make it easy for developers to access and manage an application, without the need of any on-site resources like servers, firewalls, and other tools needed to manage a development environment – all of this work has been done for them in the cloud,” Oram said.

The popularity of cloud environments is also continuing to increase according to Oram, because it can be “more cost-effective to allow cloud providers to host and manage applications – leaving only the task of configuring application features – not the underlying infrastructure.”

As for the future, Oram said, as more SugarCRM partners and enterprises start leveraging cloud platforms such as Amazon’s EC2 – there will be a large variety of cloud-based applications built on the core Sugar platform for organizations of all sizes to choose from.