IBM is ripping out a reported 67,000 internal Siebel seats that it’s been paying Oracle for – the same Oracle that competes with IBM at the top of its voice – and replacing them with SugarCRM.

It’s to say the least a boost for SugarCRM, which is doubtlessly thinking IPO at some point, because not only is IBM reselling SugarCRM, it’s eating the dog food – a great reference as well as a way into the enterprise.

Sugar’s chief attraction is reportedly the fact that unlike, say, Salesforce.com, Sugar is agnostic about clouds. You can use its cloud or anybody’s cloud like, say, IBM’s SmartCloud Enterprise. And it’s not as cumbersome, restrictive and expensive as, ahem, older solutions.

SugarCRM claims to be the third-biggest CRM vendor out there with 10 million downloads to its credit, over a million active users, some 7,000 organizations using it and 30,000 registered developers.

It just pulled down another $33 million in equity and debt financing this month from New Enterprise Associates, which gets a board seat, along with new investors Silicon Valley Bank and Gold Hill Capital. All of SugarCRM’s current investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Walden International also participated.

That makes a total of $79.5 million.

The new money is earmarked for pushing into the enterprise and pursuing strategic business opportunities of course.

Source : cloud computing expo