SugarCRM is making its open source customer relationship management application, Sugar Community Edition, available to developers on the Amazon EC2 cloud.

Sugar Community Edition 5.2 is available as a pre-packaged Amazon Machine Image on the Amazon site to give development teams a central location to produce and assemble custom Sugar applications, said Clint Oram, SugarCRM's co-founder and VP of product management. Developers can be located at different sites around the world and still contribute code to the common site, he said.

Developers can provision an application and test it in Amazon's EC2 cloud without needing special hardware set up by their IT department, he added. The EC2 offering is aimed at independent software vendors producing custom versions of Sugar as well as enterprise developers.

"In the cloud, a team of developers can do development and test in a mirror image of their production environment," said Oram. To do so, developers need to capture and upload a copy of their production environment to the cloud.

In May, SugarCRM announced a Cloud Console for its Express edition of Sugar, making the $499 per year version of its software available in the cloud as well. The Express edition is aimed at five users, with a $799 version aimed at 10 users. When used in the cloud, it is available at cloud rates under $10 per user per month.

Sugar is open source code built as a PHP and MySQL application. In the future, it will be able to run on a variety of clouds as well as Amazon's EC2, said Oram.

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