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After four months of beta availability and testing, SugarCRM today officially announced the general availability of its Sugar 6 CRM customer relationship management platform. Sugar 6 includes an open source community edition as well as commercially licensed professional and enterprise editions.

In Episode 2 of our Extreme CRM Makeover - Open Source Edition, we are going to look at SugarCRM, which is the "general contractor" supplying the CRM that will makeover American Bancard, the financial services company we wrote about in Episode 1.

SugarCRM today launched a major upgrade of its open source customer relationship management platform that emphasizes ease of use, information access and setup. Sugar 6, which was officially launched Tuesday, offers a simplified, Web 2.0 interface with big icons, simplified default views, a ShortCut bar and one-click access to a multitude of application data.

Today's midsize organizations have everything but the proverbial kitchen sink to choose from when it comes to CRM solutions, according to the latest marketplace report from Forrester Research. At least 19 different CRM products are viable options for that segment of the marketplace, according to this year's Forrester Wave: CRM Suites for Midsized Organizations report — though those products come from only 13 different vendors.

Cloud computing and open-source software have been intertwined since the early days of the cloud. Vendors such as Amazon.com, SugarCRM, Rackspace, and many, many others, utilized open-source choices for everything from virtualization to data stores to user interfaces. Today, it is fair to say that much of the cloud was made possible by both the economics and malleability of open-source software.