Microsoft announced a major new release of Dynamics CRM recently
with the usual feature and function upgrades, but most of the
hoopla surrounds a more globally available and aggressively priced
Online version.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 will be available on premise (with
software shipping in February), but with the online version
released recently, the service is now available for the first time
outside of North America. Dynamics CRM 2011 Online service now
supports 41 languages and reaches 40 major markets, including most
European countries and key markets in Central and South America and
the Asia Pacific region.
At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference (2010) in Santa Clara, CA, Sococo
President Paul Brody gives TechWeb's David Berlind a demonstration
of the company's latest entry into the social enterprise software
market: a technology called SmartSpaces.In going global with the
Online version, Microsoft is going after competitors Salesforce.com
and Oracle CRM On Demand, both of which are well established
internationally. Salesforce, for example, gets 30 percent of its
income from Europe and Asia Pacific.
Hoping to take a bite out of Salesforce.com's fast growth,
Microsoft announced aggressive promotional pricing of USD 34 per
user, per month. That's well below the cost of Salesforce.com
Professional services, which start at USD 65 per user, per month,
and Enterprise services, which start at USD 125 per user, per
month. Oracle CRM On Demand starts at USD 75 per user, per month
with higher fees for a dedicated version.
Dynamics CRM Online pricing increases to USD 44 per user, per month
once the one-year promotion expires, still well below the cost of
its rivals. What's more, Microsoft insists Dynamics CRM Online is
best compared to Saleforce.com Enterprise, a USD 125 per-user,
per-month offering.
"We give you full sales, service and marketing functionality in our
standard service where Salesforce.com does not offer marketing
functionality or real-time intelligence unless you use the
Enterprise edition," explained Bill Patterson, director, Microsoft
Dynamics CRM, noting that Dynamics dashboards are continuously
refreshed whereas Salesforce.com requires users to hit refresh,
something they can do only twice per hour without incurring
additional charges.
Salesforce counters that few customers need more than a couple of
status updates per hour, and Dynamics CRM and Salesforce.com
"aren't even close to comparable," said an executive who described
the latter as far more social, open and mobile.
"Our Chatter collaboration layer gives users a whole new social way
to interact with the application, and that's something Microsoft
isn't even close to delivering," said Scott Holden, senior director
of product marketing at Salesforce.com. "We also have mobile
capabilities running on all the major platforms, including
iPhone/iPad, Android and Blackberry. Microsoft is closed off in
that respect, so you get what you pay for."
Microsoft does not break out exact on-premise versus online
statistics, but it says the two offerings together have some 23,000
customers. Roughly 10 percent of those firms are running in the
cloud. Salesforce.com, the on-demand CRM marketshare leader, now
has more than 87,000 customers running exclusively in the
cloud.
The feature and function upgrades to Dynamics CRM 2011 include a
business process engine that lets power users and administrators
develop wizard-driven workflows. A sales team, for example, could
create a process that prompts salespeople through the process of
qualifying a lead and approving a deal proposal. Microsoft says the
Web-based interfaces, workflows and related alerts can be developed
without coding.
Dynamics CRM 2011 also offers improved integrations with Microsoft
products including SharePoint and Link Online (formerly
Communications Server and LiveMeeting). The integrations to
SharePoint surface relevant content, such as contracts and
proposals, while integrations to Link Online expose presence
awareness, customer contacts, chat capabilities, video conferencing
and phone contacts.
The new CRM process capabilities can be tied to Azure services to
expose customer-facing process via the Web. Azure services offer
elastic compute power, so a spike in customer support activity or a
big marketing campaign could scale up quickly to support spikey
demand.
Given Saleforce.com's size and momentum in CRM, in North America
and globally, it's tough to imagine the vendor taking much of a
marketshare hit from Dynamics CRM. It's easier to see Microsoft's
aggressive pricing impacting the rest of the CRM field, among
cautious customers looking for low-cost replacements for aging
on-premise deployments.
Microsoft's hybrid on-premise-or-on-demand story looks like a safe
middle ground for customers who aren't as sold on the cloud
computing and Facebook social networking models that defines
Salesforce.com's strategy.