SugarCRM Inc., the world’s leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, has announced a specially designed strategic partnership with CareBrains Inc., Japan-based provider of open source software application consulting, training, implementation and support.

In response to growing demand for Sugar commercial open source products in the Japanese market, SugarCRM and CareBrains are providing CareBrains partners access to SugarCRM partner program benefits, which include special partner Japanese language pack access, resell rights to Sugar commercial versions, and fully localized sales and marketing tools.

With over 120 commercial customers in Japan and Asia, SugarCRM continues to increase its global presence with over 40 language packs and full international support throughout its commercial open source application. At 1 million worldwide downloads of Sugar Open Source and 1,000 commercial customers, SugarCRM has over 300 extensions and other enhancements contributed by its global open source development community, with Japan playing an extremely prominent role.

CareBrains has been supporting Japanese open source community of SugarCRM with Waseda University Business School, a leading business school in Asia, and local governments of Chiba prefecture and Chiba city. This unmatched and unique “industrial- academia community” now has more than 1,000 participants and is now becoming one of the largest communities of open source applications in Asia.

Partnership Benefits
Working strategically with SugarCRM, CareBrains will expand its current partner program to J-Gold, J-Silver and J-Bronze partners in order to more effectively answer the growing demand for Sugar in Japan. “J” stands for the joint-efforts between SugarCRM and CareBrains besides meaning Japan. J-Gold, J-Silver and J-Bronze partner programs cover all the benefits offered by SugarCRM as Gold, Silver and Bronze partner programs. Now CareBrains has become the only company in Japan who can offer these partner programs. The programs will be offered to systems integrators, ASP providers, and any companies interested in conducting business with SugarCRM. Special benefits include:

- Access to the Japanese language pack developed for Sugar by CareBrains
- Rights to resell Sugar commercial subscriptions and value added services
- Increased profit margins (dependant on level of partnership with CareBrains)
- Japan-based sales and technical training
- Japanese language sales and marketing tools
- Ability to provide Sugar on-demand (for J-Gold partners)
- Promote partner company introductions on homepages of SugarCRM and CareBrains.

“We appreciate the extra attention CareBrains’ gives to our Japan customers and partners, plus their key contributions to SugarCRM’s Japanese localization project,” said John Roberts, CEO SugarCRM. “Japan is an extremely important market for us, and Japanese customers have very high expectations for quality and support. Partnering with CareBrains will help increase the reach of Sugar’s products by optimizing the performance of Sugar for our growing customer base in Japan.”

About SugarCRM
SugarCRM is the world’s leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software for companies of all sizes. SugarCRM easily adapts to any business environment by offering a more flexible, cost-effective alternative than proprietary applications. SugarCRM’s open source architecture allows companies to more easily customize and integrate customer-facing business processes in order to build and maintain more profitable relationships. SugarCRM offers several deployment options, including on-demand, on-premise and appliance-based solutions to suit customers’ security, integration and configuration needs.

About CareBrains
As a strategic reseller of SugarCRM, CareBrains is the only one company in Japan which supports open source software communities in the business application areas while delivering solutions built on them to maximize return on investment on the clients’ side. One of the strengths which differentiate CareBrains from other companies is that they also have optimal solution sets to offer when our clients want to implement a new strategy as pragmatically as possible. In their solutions, CareBrains’ consultants and clients always function collaboratively as a team. They work closely and continuously from early identification of the problem, to the implementation of customized action plans.