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SugarCRM’s Latest is ‘SaaS in a Box’

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a wonderful model for enterprises and end users that don’t want to deploy software on their own infrastructure. But what happens if you want to set up your own SaaS business and don’t want to just pass of customers to a big SaaS vendor? That’s the general idea behind […]

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SMK

Sean Michael Kerner

May 22, 2008

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Software as a Service (SaaS) is a wonderful model for enterprises and end
users that don’t want to deploy software on their own infrastructure. But
what happens if you want to set up your own SaaS business and don’t want to
just pass of customers to a big SaaS vendor?

That’s the general idea behind professional open source vendor SugarCRM’s in
development Sugar Data Center Edition (DCE). Sugar DCE enables SugarCRM
partners to effectively have control of their own SugarCRM SaaS deployments.
The new SugarCRM offering comes as both the CRM and SaaS marketplaces heat
up with Salesforce.com and NetSuite pushing to grow share and revenues.

“What this is essentially is SaaS in a box,” Martin Schneider Director of
Product Marketing at SugarCRM told InternetNews.com. “It’s packaging
up our infrastructure and allowing our partners and our customers to take
advantage of that to deal with multiple instances of Sugar from one
centralized console.”

SugarCRM already offers a SaaS offering called Sugar On Demand which is
where the technologies for DCE were refined. The DCE version will enable
third parties to do On Demand themselves with systems management, monitoring
and provisioning tools for Sugar.

The DCE is a more viable approach to deploying multiple instances of Sugar than simply using virtualization according to Schneider. In a basic virtualization scenario a provider could simply clone an instance
of Sugar and run it on multiple virtual machines. Schneider argued that
Sugar DCE is a bit different. He explained that DCE includes subscription
and license management tools as well as activity reports that are all
customized for the needs of a Sugar deployment.

“If you’re doing Sugar this takes the legwork out of it,” Schneider said.
“We’ve been building it for ourselves and this works. It’s highly available
and scalable.”

The DCE is a more viable approach to deploying multiple instances of Sugar than simply using virtualization according to Schneider. In a basic virtualization scenario a provider could simply clone an instance
of Sugar and run it on multiple virtual machines. Schneider argued that
Sugar DCE is a bit different. He explained that DCE includes subscription
and license management tools as well as activity reports that are all
customized for the needs of a Sugar deployment.

“If you’re doing Sugar this takes the legwork out of it,” Schneider said.
“We’ve been building it for ourselves and this works. It’s highly available
and scalable.”

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.