The Epicom team is on-site at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco for SugarCon, the SugarCRM Users and Developers Conference. We’ll be blogging about the event all week, but here are some big announcements from the first morning’s sessions.

Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM kicked things off with the announcement of SugarCRM 6. The new version offers big improvements to the SugarCRM user experience. Sugar 6 looks very “Web 2.0″ and takes much greater advantage of web technologies like AJAX to minimize the steps needed to be complete a task. Epicom has been working with Sugar under a non-disclosure agreement over the last six months to evaluate and offer suggestions for improving version 6. We are excited this new version is now public and ready for official beta release. Larry says version 6 will be generally available sometime this summer, probably in July.

Here are some pictures from the morning keynote sessions.

Larry Augustin kicks things off at the morning keynote

Amazing statistics on the growth of SugarCRM

Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM, speaking at SugarCon