SugarCRM recently teamed up with IBM and the results of the ‘coupling’ are multifold; after SugarCRM’s acquisition of iExtensions CRM from IEnterprises announced at SugarCon, SugarCRM’s annual conference, Sugar 6 users can now schedule and host web meetings from within their CRM platform, new connectors for IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Suite and IBM Websphere Cast Iron for SugarCRM integration platform and innovative integration solutions combining IBM’s i operating system, Power 7 servers and SugarCRM software. Starting with today, SugarCRM isoffering support for Oracle, Amazon, Cisco, Citrix and a few others as well.

“The latest edition of Sugar 6 will also offer integrations with popular web meeting tools including Cisco WebEx Meeting Center and Citrix-GoToMeeting,” SugarCRM announced. “Additionally, Sugar 6 users will be able to upload, manage and share Google Docs right inside the Sugar 6 user interface. The open and flexible Sugar 6 platform offers users choice in how they wish to build their own social business processes.”

Mobile devices are receiving attention as well from SugarCRM as it will offer support for the iPad, Android and Blackberry, offline synchronization capabilities and a new HTML5-based charting engine. Another fruitful partnership on behalf of SugarCRM is with InsideView, social media aggregator for businesses,  out of which SugarCRM customers will have access to InsideView’s platform free of charge.

Newcomer SugarCRM is investing a lot of effort into making itself known in the business. With strong competitors such as Microsoft Dynamics, Sugar is reaching out for acknowledgement, by bringing innovation with its social media features mentioned earlier. Microsoft Dynamics SL 2011 is the latest update of Microsoft’s enterprise resource planning software. Among the improvements made that cut off unnecessary data entry tasks, the new version supports integration with Microsoft Project Server 2010, SharePoint 2010, Office 2010, SQL Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM through its Web Services platform.

Data analytics are highly sought after by businesses, given the fact that they can now be readily applied to social media and mobile marketing. These are two big areas of growth and opportunity, especially for marketing and sales. Citrusleaf for example, is launching a NoSQL database platform, a more simplified solution for its management and scalability. The company already has a penchant for the mobile sector, finding that marketing companies are having to process a great deal of information based on disparate user activity. To this end, Citrusleaf is leaning towards location-based expansion, among other areas pertaining to the mobile sector, helping to grow the NoSQL community into new interfaces.

mBlast is another good example of intelligent tools at work, such as mPact, managing online (social) media information and delivering reports. It is obvious that CRM and related tools are undergoing big changes, with more data-driven features being incorporated.  This is backed up by last week’s Salesforce acquisition of Radian6.