Windows AzurePartner Solution Case Study

CRM Vendor Quickly Adapts to New Platform, Adds Global, Scalable Delivery Channel

OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Computers—software

Partner ProfileSugarCRM provides commercial open-source customer relationship management (CRM) software to customers and value-added resellers (VARs). Headquartered in Cupertino, California, it employs 140 people.

Business SituationTo serve the unique needs of its customers, SugarCRM wanted to ensure that its software would be available on as many technology platforms as possible.

SolutionSugarCRM ported its applications to the Windows Azure™ platform so that its VARs could deploy SugarCRM with minimum capital expense and provide customers with a highly reliable, scalable CRM solution on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Benefits Quick development Flexible pricing model World-class database technology

“I’ve been astounded at how easy it was to make SugarCRM work well inside of Windows Azure. The total effort on our part was two engineers for about two weeks.”

Clint Oram, Vice President of Products, SugarCRM

SugarCRM provides open-source customer relationship management (CRM) software and focuses on its “Sugar Open Cloud” strategy, meaning that the company makes its applications available for a variety of on-premises and hosted service platforms. The independent software vendor recently ported its application to the Windows Azure ™ platform to enable its customers and value-added resellers to take advantage of real-time scalability, geographically dispersed Microsoft® data centers, and maximum data availability to gain high end performance without investing in additional infrastructure. The ease of deployment and pay-as-you-go pricing will also help customers control IT costs. Thanks to strong support for programming language interoperability within the Windows Azure platform, SugarCRM was able to

SituationFounded as an open-source project in 2004, SugarCRM provides commercial open-source customer relationship management (CRM) software. With offices in Cupertino, California; Munich, Germany; and Shanghai, China, the independent software vendor (ISV) offers one of the most widely adopted CRM applications around the world. SugarCRM applications have been downloaded more than 5 million times and currently serve more than 500,000 users in 75 languages.

SugarCRM customers include some of the world’s largest enterprises such as Avis, AXA, and BDO Seidman; however, the majority of its customers are small and midsize organizations that are looking to improve their CRM effectiveness without taking on significant costs in their IT environment. For many customers, Sugar is their first CRM system, and they stick with it. Available in three editions—Sugar Community Edition, Sugar Professional, and Sugar Enterprise—the application delivers a very simple, straightforward but powerful CRM application that combines sales force automation, marketing automation, and customer support automation in one user interface. This makes it possible for organizations to manage all of their customer-facing departments with a single tool.

“Our customers gravitate to Sugar because they want an easy-to-use CRM application that deploys quickly,

but they also want to run that application on top of the technology stack on which they’ve standardized their IT department,” say Clint Oram, Vice President of Products and Cofounder of SugarCRM. “We’ve always focused on delivering our software wherever and however our customers want to run it. We’ve never been tied to any one operating system or any one database technology.”

SugarCRM applications are based on PHP, a run-time programming language designed for Web-based applications. Because PHP is designed to be portable and run on top of dozens of operating systems, Web servers, and hardware configurations, it minimizes the effort required to port applications from one platform to another.

That agnostic approach to the underlying technology allows SugarCRM to offer customers more options for software delivery. It is available as an on-premises deployable application and as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that is available from various vendors through the “cloud”—delivered over the Internet and hosted in a separate data center. This includes SugarCRM’s own cloud service—Sugar On Demand. “More and more of our partners have been moving to the cloud to gain scalability without having to make a huge investment in infrastructure,” says Oram. “To support our ‘Sugar Open Cloud’ strategy we enable our software to be

“Whether it’s a private cloud hosted for a particular customer or one of our partners delivering a SugarCRM SaaS solution…, Windows Azure provides a strong delivery channel for our product.”

delivered through all the major cloud service provider environments. Outsourcing the infrastructure for some applications to the cloud allows customers to turn a capital expense into an operating expense, which helps customers who want to conserve cash.”

SugarCRM applications were already running on various cloud services. When Microsoft announced the pending launch of the Windows Azure™ platform, SugarCRM saw huge potential in porting its software to the Windows Azure platform. This move could expedite time to market because of the platform’s support for popular programming languages. It could also further the company’s “Sugar Open Cloud” goal by providing customers with a globally scalable product running on a high-end infrastructure and highly redundant database system, at a pay-as-you-go price.

SolutionThe Windows Azure platform is an Internet-scale cloud services platform that is hosted in Microsoft® data centers. It provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used separately or together. The Windows Azure platform offers a scalable infrastructure with a pay-as-you-go pricing model that enables customers to pay for the service as they consume it, rather than buying and managing on-premises technology.

“Whether it’s a private cloud hosted for a particular customer or one of our partners delivering a SugarCRM SaaS solution for a particular region or market vertical, Windows Azure provides a strong delivery channel for our product,” says Oram. “We’ve been working closely with Microsoft to extend our application and take advantage of those strengths.” SugarCRM is written on PHP, which runs on the Windows Server® operating system and Internet Information Services (IIS) 7. “Because PHP runs well on top of IIS and IIS works really well on top of Windows Azure, it was easy for us to port SugarCRM to Azure,” says Oram. “We knocked down the technical challenges very quickly with a couple of engineers in just a few weeks.”

SugarCRM started porting its application to Windows Azure in October 2009 and deployed a proof of concept of the new version at the end of that month. “We had to learn how file system structures work inside of

Figure 1: SugarCRM delivers a simple, straightforward but powerful CRM application that will be available to customers as a Windows Azure–hosted service through several SugarCRM partners.

Windows Azure and what type of configuration files we had to put in place, but that was quick to work through,” says Oram. SugarCRM engineers also modified code to optimize the application for the Microsoft SQL Azure™ component of the Windows Azure platform. SQL Azure is a cloud-based relational database service built on Microsoft SQL Server® database management software. It allows on-premises and cloud applications to store relational and other types of data on servers in Microsoft data centers.

The ISV is also architecting its application to take advantage of Blob Storage, which enables applications to store binary large objects (blobs)—up to 50 gigabytes (GB) each—in the cloud. These blobs can be served from many servers to scale out to meet high traffic demands and to make the data accessible from anywhere at any time. The data is replicated at least three times for high availability and recoverability.

“The virtualization component of any cloud service environment requires that we design our application for the possibility that the virtual machine hosting the runtime environment could go away at any time,” says Oram. “If that happens, files need to be written to an area that sticks around, and that’s what Windows Azure Blob Storage provides.”

When the SugarCRM application is fully ported to the Windows Azure platform in December 2009, all Sugar

editions will be available to customers as a Windows Azure–hosted service through several SugarCRM partners.

BenefitsSugarCRM took advantage of familiar development tools and strong support for PHP to quickly port its open-source CRM application to the Windows Azure platform. By extending its application to the cloud services platform, the ISV will help its value-added resellers (VARs) cost-effectively deploy custom CRM solutions that scale globally and minimize cost for customers.

Quick Development The straightforward design and support for various programming languages within the Windows Azure platform greatly simplified the ISV’s efforts to port its application to Windows Azure. “Every piece of the puzzle logically fits together in Windows Azure so that we were able to work with it very quickly,” says Oram. “I’ve been astounded at how easy it was to make SugarCRM work well inside of Windows Azure. The total effort on our part was two engineers for about two weeks, rather than having to put a whole team on this for months.”

High-End Infrastructure in aPay-As-You-Go Model The combination of the cloud services operating system, developer services, and hosting services included within the Windows Azure platform offers new options for businesses of all sizes. “Although most companies can

“Windows Azure gives our multinational customers enormous flexibility to deliver a high-performance, massively scalable application to users in any part of the world on top of one technology base.”

Clint Oram, Vice President of Products, SugarCRM

reduce their IT spend by outsourcing infrastructure, the companies that will benefit the most are those that could never come close to implementing this type of compute capacity because of the cost,” says Oram. “With Windows Azure, they’ll have a massively scalable, fully redundant, and completely secure cloud platform with a pay-as-you-go pricing model.”

Because customers pay for only the Windows Azure service that they use, the cost becomes an operating expense rather than a capital expense, which makes it easier to fit it into their budgets. “Some of our 5- or 10-person VARs around the world can’t afford to buy and manage the technology required to deliver CRM-as-a-service to their customers,” says Oram. “But now they can deliver a valuable service to their customers on top of the Windows Azure infrastructure for a fraction of what it would cost to set up their own infrastructure.”

Enterprise-Class Database Technologyin the Cloud Built on the enterprise-class SQL Server database management software and Windows Server technologies, the SQL Azure database component of the Windows Azure platform made it easier for SugarCRM to quickly extend its application to run in the cloud environment. “Windows Azure is going to look very different than our other cloud service providers because it is the only one that delivers SQL Azure,” says Oram.

“Other database technologies available in cloud environments typically require developers to make them all work together. We are excited about SQL Azure because it takes care of the hard parts of creating and managing a highly redundant, disaster-proof database environment.”

Global Scalability Another big advantage of SQL Azure is that it is built on a geographically distributed data center that offers virtually unlimited scalability and built-in data redundancy across multiple sites. “The financial investment to make the data centers available across various geographies is a huge value,” says Oram. “Windows Azure gives our multinational customers enormous flexibility to deliver a high-performance, massively scalable application to users in any part of the world on top of one technology base. Even our midsize customers will be able to deliver a quality application experience to users in China, South Africa, the United States, and Europe—all at the same time.”

Windows Azure PlatformThe Windows Azure platform provides an excellent foundation for expanding online product and service offerings. The main components include: Windows Azure. Windows Azure

is the development, service hosting, and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft data centers. In addition, Windows Azure serves developers’ connectivity needs through the following services. The Service Bus connects

services and applications across network boundaries to help developers build distributed applications.

The Access Control Service provides federated, claims-based access control for REST Web services.

Microsoft SQL Azure. Microsoft SQL Azure offers the first cloud-based relational and self-managed database service built on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 technologies. 

To learn more about the Windows Azure platform, visit: www.windowsazure.com

For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about SugarCRM products and services, call (408) 454-6940 or visit the Web site at: www.sugarcrm.com

Additional Resources:Download: Windows Azure and ISVs – A Guide for Decision MakersDownload: Windows Azure Tools and SDK

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.Document published November 2009

Software and Services Windows Azure Platform

− Windows Azure− Microsoft SQL Azure− Blob Storage

Microsoft Server Product Portfolio− Microsoft SQL Server