SugarCRM announced a reseller agreement with BT. BT will propose SugarCRM to it's 1.2 million business customers. Even though this won't translate in immediate deployment by all of them, it shows how far an open source product can go, as BT's CRM of choice was until now from Siebel.

Read on The Open Road.

SugarCRM, maker of the namesake opensource CRM application (although lots of features are only available to paying customers), just got additional funding to boost international expansion. ITs CEO wants to lead it to an IPO within two years, although the acquisition spree of open source companies could change plans, as it did with Mysql.

Although SugarCRM seems to be growing healthily, with a cash flow positive quarter, it "has secured $14.5 million of a $20 million Series D round". Even with a plunge in Q4 2007, funding is still available for open source companies.

SugarCRM announced the general availability of Sugar 5.0, the latest of their CRM solution. It boasts new features such as a new Ajax email client, improved Dashboards with new charting capabilities, a new Metadata Driven User Interface, improved Access Control.

Note that the Open Source edition doesn't include all capabilities, as some features are only part of the professional or enterprise editions.

A new on demand offering has been unveiled at the same time.

After the announcement at the beginning of this week, the first beta release of SugarCRM 5.0 is now finally available for download. A demo is available. The 5.0 Community Edition is the first realease of SugarCRM under the GPL v3.

SugarCRM has announced that they're switching to the GPL v3 for the Sugar Community Edition 5.0, due to be released in september. Earlier version are available under the Sugar Public License (based on the Mozilla Public License), and a FAQ is available about the change.