SYDNEY, Australia -- 9 March 2005 -- Custom Technology today announced a distribution partnership with SugarCRM Inc. to bring SugarCRM to the Australian & New Zealand market.

"Open Source is now extending beyond the core operating system and networking", said Gordon Hubbard, Managing Director, Custom Technology. "SugarCRM is an example of a business application that leverages a Commercial Open Source development model, and the result is a customer relationship management application that competes with proprietary and expensive applications from established CRM software and hosting providers."

SugarCRM represents a new generation of commercial grade CRM applications built for and optimized to run on a pure Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) open source software platform. Made available under an open source software license, SugarCRM was developed leveraging the combined ideas and contributed code of CRM developers worldwide.

"SugarCRM is proud to have CustomTech as a partner." says Cameron Jackson, Director of Alliances at SugarCRM. "CustomTech has been a pioneer in the delivery of business-class commercial open source applications in Australia and we look forward to working with them to expand support for SugarCRM end users and resellers in Australia".

Sugar Professional

Sugar Professional is an enterprise class, production level CRM application for managing mission-critical interactions related to sales, marketing, services and support.

Sugar Professional is a visible source CRM application that is a superset of Sugar Open Source. Comparing the two, Sugar Professional provides enhanced application functionality with optimized performance and is supported by the SugarCRM staff. When you buy Sugar Professional you get the software, ongoing support and upgrades for one year. Sugar Professional is the best solution for companies that need assurance that their business-critical application is working flawlessly on a long-term basis. Additional features that give larger organizations a definite business advantage include: end-user access and data security management, quotes module, reports, and advanced wireless device compatibility.

Sugar Open Source

Sugar Open Source is an enterprise class CRM application for managing mission-critical interactions related to sales, marketing, services and support. Sugar Open Source is the perfect solution for companies that desire an effective core CRM solution that offers no professional support, or would like to evaluate Sugar Suite before acquiring Sugar Professional.

Availability

The Sugar Open Source Edition 2.51 is available under an open source software license at http://www.SourceForge.net. Sugar Professional Edition 2.51 is available under commercial license from http://www.CustomTech.com.au for an annual fee of A$344.30 (incl GST) per user per year with discounts for volume and includes 12 months of Sugar Professional patches and upgrades, installation and maintenance support, and access to the premium knowledge base support and developer forums. Sugar Professional is also available as a hosted version, Sugar On-Demand. Sugar On-Demand eliminates in-house software installation and maintenance.

About Custom Technology Australia

Custom Technology Australia Pty Ltd provides value added product distribution, technical support, integration and development services for Open Systems including Linux and UNIX. Our vision is to deliver Open Systems that provide real competitive advantage to our business partners. Custom Technology is the SugarCRM distributor for ANZ, Scalix distributor, the Samsung SDS Certified Distributor for Samsung Contact, SmoothWall Security Centre, an IBM Business Partner and a Sun iForce Partner. Visit Custom Technology at http://www.customtech.com.au

About SugarCRM

SugarCRM provides commercial open source customer relationship management applications for companies of all sizes worldwide. SugarCRM was founded in 2004 by three Silicon Valley CRM professionals with over twenty years of experience spanning marketing, application design and engineering. The company is headquartered in Cupertino, California and can be reached by visiting http://www.sugarcrm.com.

Press Contact

Gordon Hubbard
Managing Director
gordon@customtech.com.au
Tel: 02 9659 9590
Fax: 02 9659 9510

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