"Our participation in the Oracle PartnerNetwork will allow us to strengthen our relationship with Oracle and ensure the best possible support for Oracle users who deploy our new Sugar Enterprise platform," said SugarCRM's CEO John Roberts (pictured talking to SYS-CON.TV earlier this year) , as he announced today that SugarCRM has joined the Oracle PartnerNetwork to support Oracle Database users that adopt Sugar Enterprise Edition, the latest product in the company's suite of open source customer relationship management (CRM) solutions.

Sugar Enterprise Edition is the first SugarCRM solution available for Oracle9i Database and Oracle Database 10g environments, Roberts said, giving Oracle users the option to adopt open source CRM software that eliminates the high cost and limited back-end integration capabilities of proprietary CRM systems.

 "This demonstrates our commitment to the Oracle market and is an important step that we expect will help us extend our reach into larger enterprises with advanced database, mobility, reporting and customization needs," he added.

SugarCRM's Sugar Suite, said Roberts, ranks as the most successful open source enterprise application in the marketplace, with more than 300,000 downloads since it was introduced in July 2004.

"It is an enterprise-class CRM software platform that features a complete range of CRM functionality at a fraction of the price of proprietary CRM products," said Roberts. 

It also offers open standards enabling low-cost integration with legacy customer databases, and a straightforward user interface without the complexity that frequently causes traditional CRM implementations to fail, he noted.

Sugar Enterprise Edition offers all the features and functions of all products in the suite plus a variety of features specifically tailored to large organizations. These include support for Oracle Database, an offline client that automatically synchronizes all changes made to the application by traveling users forced to work offline, and advanced reporting that allows administrators to write multidimensional queries in order to report on complex associations beyond those available with the standard reporting module.

The annual license fee of $449 per user includes 12 months of application updates; installation assistance; trouble ticketing; global weekday phone/email-based technical support (9AM-6PM Pacific time); and full production support including patches.

Demonstrations of Sugar Enterprise will be available in SugarCRM's booth at Oracle OpenWorld from September 19-21 in San Francisco's Moscone Center.