SugarCRM, the commercial open source CRM house, is now in beta with Sugar 5.0 and - given its success in attracting customers - the company is telling the press that it's on the road to going public sometime in the next couple of years.

It figures it can be a $100 million company in that timeframe. But first it's got to get to $15 million, a milestone it's hoping to pass this year. It was cash flow positive its last quarter.

Rival Salesforce.com, meanwhile, is shooting to do $734 million this year.

With Sugar 5.0 users can build custom modules from scratch or combine existing or custom objects into a new module and there's a new AJAX e-mail client and a new Multi-Instance on-Demand architecture.

CEO John Roberts claims customers can now "break away from the predatory lock-in of proprietary CRM vendors."

The company says that the new architecture takes advantage of the horizontal scale-out capabilities of open source software, significant increases in the processing power of commodity hardware and SugarCRM-developed systems management to eliminate the trade-offs between deep customization and upgradeability associated with previous generations of On-Demand CRM.

The new new-mail client is supposed to combine the functionality of a desktop e-mail client with the portability of a web-based e-mail application.