Larry Augustin, CEO of Sugar CRM, has chosen to offer customers the ability to host Sugar CRM on Azure, and says the platform was easy to build on, even though SugarCRM is built using PHP. In his vision, customers will be able to choose which clouds their software as a service are hosted on, so an enterprise can choose the applications and the clouds those run on. This is the polar opposite of the vision espoused by SugarCRM’s biggest rival, Salesforce.com, which hosts its software on its own cloud. But the power of the modular and open approach is hard to deny, and Microsoft is smart to embrace that.