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SugarCRM (News - Alert), a global customer relationship management company, has expanded its technology integrations with IBM (News - Alert) to enable organizations to leverage best practices for creating social businesses.

Officials said that the integrations with IBM will expand the company's breadth of offerings for social businesses. SugarCRM customers RealConnections and Virosafe are already using the integrated technology to enhance collaboration and customer relationship management.

“Every competitor is just one online search away from getting to your next customer, so sales teams need to be armed with the right tools that help them work more effectively,” said Clint Oram, CTO and co-founder of SugarCRM, in a release. “We believe IBM is a leader in social business and delivers a best-in-class technology platform for collaboration. By adding CRM to the mix, organizations have the ability to easily access and aggregate pertinent customer data from social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn (News - Alert) and Facebook so they can make more informed business decisions.”

The new enhancements include SugarCRM on IBM DB2 – Sugar now supports IBM DB2 database software on Linux, Unix and Windows systems. Users will now be provided with industry-leading performance across multiple workloads and are able to lower administration, storage, development and server costs, and SugarCRM on IBM SmartCloud Enterprise – this integration has been designed to provide businesses across all industries greater visibility into sales, marketing and support to gain and retain customers. It also offers a scalable cloud infrastructure to grow as the business grows.

Officials confirmed that in April 2011, SugarCRM acquired iExtensions CRM from iEnterprises, Inc., a CRM solution built entirely for IBM collaborative technologies including IBM SmartCloud for Social Business, IBM Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino.

The acquisition helped expand the SugarCRM's product portfolio for IBM customers, who have the goal of becoming social businesses, resulting in improved collaboration for customers.

Erik Vos, founder and co-owner of RealConnections, a cloud services aggregator and IT consulting company, said, “By moving from Salesforce.com to SugarCRM, we have realized immediate cost benefits as well as improved ease of use and ease of integrations with social business applications, like IBM's SmartCloud for Social Business. As a result of the integration with IBM SmartCloud for Social Business, we have improved collaboration with employees and customers and have greater visibility into opportunity management. Overall data quality, CRM functionality and reliability have improved significantly.”

In related news, PSTech announced new technology integration with SugarCRM. Through this integration, customers will achieve a much easier usage of Cisco (News - Alert) IP Telephony. 

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