It has developed a SugarCRM business connector as part of its Open Studio, On Demand, and Integration Suite products. This will enable developers not only to pull in external customer and business data to the system, but also to export to business systems like accounting and invoicing for replications and synchronization.

The adapter also allows for the inclusion of SugarCRM data in third-party business intelligence applications because SugarCRM only has rudimentary reporting and dashborading tools built into it. The bi-directional integration can be done in near-real time or batch modes.

The connector uses the standard application programming interfaces provided by SugarCRM and provides access all SugarCRM subjects, leads, accounts, opportunities, and marketing campaigns. It adds another data source to the 150-plus applications and databases with which Talend’s software integrates. It also joins 200 other third-party extensions for SugarCRM listed on the SugarExchange online marketplace. It is one of a dozen or so products that have been put though a rigorous testing process to earn a formal SugarExchange certification.

Talend, which is based in Paris and recently opened a US headquarters in Los Altos, California, claims to be the first provider of open source data integration software. It said there have been 100,000 user downloads of its pure Open Studio suite since its release late last year.

This is something that we’ve been working on for a bit of time, said Yves de Montcheuil, who joined Talend as vice president of marketing earlier this year from French ETL firm Sunopsis following its acquisition by Oracle. One of major obstacles for adoption of CRM is ability to interoperate with other business applications in the enterprise. Lots [of customers] don’t just migrate from legacy CRM systems, they create them from scratch from customer data scattered around spreadsheets and databases. They need to smoothly get all that data into SugarCRM.

While SugarCRM might seem like a product aimed at small and medium-sized businesses, Paul Ho, director of technologies alliances at the Cupertino, California-based company, said only half of its new customers don’t have packaged CRM applications. That means the other half has implemented packaged Siebel and SAP enterprise CRM applications and the like, he said. So with Talend we’re really providing software that helps customers to migrate away from closed CRM environments and onto SugarCRM as smoothly as possible.