Competition in customer relationship management (CRM) software is about to heat up again with open-source developer SugarCRM due to release a major upgrade of its platform in late September.

In beta testing from this week, Sugar 5.0 adds the ability for customers to build bespoke modules and an Ajax-based email client. The firm said that it has now reached the end of a long cycle developing capabilities for the base platform.

“This represents four years of effort,” said Clint Oram, Sugar Europe general manager. “When we conceived of the kind of modern CRM system, this is it. With this release, we wanted to make CRM easier to interact with from a development perspective, so that non-technical users could create custom modules.”

Users can build their own modules or take existing objects, including custom objects, to create hybrids of features to complete processes such as staff recruitment, he said.

Oram said that the new Ajax mail client was at the behest of users.

“Users said, ‘Our primary means of interaction with customers is email, so why are we using Outlook?’ The Ajax client is a GMail or Yahoo Mail equivalent that is archived to the CRM system and associates with the appropriate deals or customer so you have one system of record.”

Also new are more dashboards and improved access control as well as a new architecture that Sugar said allows firms to take advantage of scale-out datacentres and upgrade when they want.

Sugar’s attitude contrasts with Salesforce.com’s multitenant architecture where servers are shared and customers move to the latest release at the same time.

Oram said that the multitenant ethos is “a reflection of yesterday’s technology when your only option was Oracle databases and a bunch of Sun servers”.

He added that open-source technologies and vertical scaling allow massive decreases in cost, and that access to third-party datacentres provided the means to bolster scalability and availability.

Oram said Sugar plans to fill in details of its new architecture over the next two months.