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SugarCRM today announced availability of SugarExchange, a marketplace of community-built applications and extensions for SugarCRM end users and administrators. SugarExchange offers production-ready community extensions and other SugarCRM packages and components, such as integration and infrastructure software. "SugarExchange is a logical extension of the commercial open source business model," says John Roberts, chairman and CEO. "This marketplace, combined with the SugarForge.org open-source community, gives the worldwide community of Sugar users and developers an end-to-end solution for developing, testing, and purchasing SugarCRM extensions." SugarExchange builds on the success of SugarForge, one of the world's most popular open-source community sites for CRM apps. SugarExchange showcases community-built products preapproved by SugarCRM for production deployments. Today, customers can download and install more than 60 applications from SugarExchange at no charge. More than 40 products are available for sale. The new marketplace complements SugarForge.org-the SugarCRM developer collaboration environment with 6,000 registered developers and 250 freely available applications and extensions. Customers can download free software offerings, including lead and contact management, e-commerce and Web self-service, email response and management, and forecasting and reporting extensions, from SugarExchange via various open source companies to their SugarCRM products, many of which are free. In addition, SugarExchange products can be deployed as SaaS through Sugar On-Demand or behind a company's firewall through Sugar On-Site. All extensions and applications offered on SugarExchange are approved to work in production instances of SugarCRM. Customers can choose the product that is right for them by using the SugarExchange ratings and popularity indicators that provide direct feedback from the SugarCRM community. Another benefit is that SugarExchange profits from SugarCRM's commercial open source development method since all products are used and tested by the open source community at SugarForge prior to gaining SugarExchange production approval. This preapproval by SugarCRM represents one of the larger advantages of SugarExchange. Traditionally, open source customers have been wary about certain open source communities they acquire software from, as the software code could be defective or malicious. "Companies know the software coming off of SugarExchange is good," says Adam Jollans, open source strategy manager at IBM, " or else SugarCRM wouldn't allow those offerings to be posted on SugarExchange if they weren't." Related articles: The 2006 Rising Stars Sweet Open Source CRM for Microsoft The (Open) Source of the Problem