According to Gartner, corporate developers spend approximately 65 percent of their effort building bridges between applications. If you're thinking that there's got to be a better way - you're right.

Data integration software provider Apatar announced connectivity to the SugarCRM open source suite. The SugarCRM "connector" integrates data between the popular customer relation management (CRM) system and a vareity of 3rd party data sources. Customer information between databases (such as MySQL, Microsoft SQL, Oracle), files (Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, CSV/TXT files), applications (Salesforce.com), and the top Web 2.0 destinations (Flickr, Amazon S3, RSS feeds) can be filtered, validated, and cleansed through Apatar.

Both the SugarCRM system and Apatar’s new connector are distributed as open source products. There is no doubt that many companies will significantly benefit from downloading and using these tools for free.