The company is also reported to be readying its Sugar 5.0 beta software for launch in April. The company’s last major release was its Sugar 4.5 version in August last year.

SugarCRM co-founder and chief technology officer Jacob Taylor is a keynote speaker at the Open Cebit event that is part of the Cebit Australia conference and exhibition held in Sydney from May 3 – 7.

“As companies become more service-based, managing customer and internal projects becomes even more critical,” SugarCRM chief executive John Roberts said.

“Project Management delivers a best-in-class project management application fully integrated with SugarCRM.”

The company quoted a Nucleus Research paper that found while 32 per cent of on-demand customers were currently using on-demand CRM, only 23 per cent were using on-demand project management.

“Managing customers and projects is the next step after acquiring them, making integrated project management a key factor in driving greater value from CRM,” said Nucleus Research vice-president Rebecca Wetteman said.

“Current SugarCRM customers have an opportunity to gain even greater return on investment by using Sugar Projects; others looking for a CRM solution with tight project management integration should investigate the Sugar offering.”

Sugar’s Project Management delivers a full project management solution combined with the sales management, marketing automation and customer support used by employees to manage customer-centric activities.

These new capabilities allow users to deploy projects across all customer-facing tasks, including campaigns, opportunities, accounts, and customer cases.

Because Project Management is integrated with Sugar’s customer information, users no longer need to be concerned with redundant or inaccurate information, lost customer data, poor information sharing, or lack of user adoption.