Microsoft drops price to partners for Dynamics CRM 4.0
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Microsoft plans to reduce the price its partners will pay for its newest customer relationship management software, code-named Titan, the company&#39;s latest foray into software-as-a-service (SaaS) CRM.
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Blog: Microsoft said it is teaming with Website Pros to offer an $80 monthly service to help small businesses set up and maintain their Web site.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft this week unveiled a partner program for its Office Live hosted service for small businesses, a product Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner predicted will one day be nearly as important to the company as its Windows client OS. Through the program, Microsoft partners get an Office Live software development kit and various training opportunities so they can build new services that will be available to subscribers on the Office Live Marketplace, said Marja Koopmans, director of partner strategy for Office Live at Microsoft. The company unveiled the program at its Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver. Microsoft currently has about 50 third-party products listed on the marketplace, Koopmans said. Currently, an Office Live subscriber has to have purchased one of two subscription-based Office Live offerings to buy an application on the marketplace. However, beginning in January, subscribers to the free version of Office Live also can purchase third-party offerings from the marketplace, Koopmans said. Partners also gain access through online forums to Microsoft Office Live engineers for assistance with building new offerings, Koopmans said. In addition to earning revenue by selling new applications, partners can offer consulting services to build Office Live-based Web sites for small businesses, she added. Beginning in January 2008, Microsoft plans to launch an affiliate program for Office Live that will give them revenue-sharing opportunities with Microsoft, Koopmans said. If partners that sell Office Live-based applications on the marketplace refer a customer to purchase an Office Live subscription, Microsoft will share a percentage of whatever the company earns from that customer with the partner. The company will disclose the specific percentage as the program is closer to launching, she added. Microsoft unveiled Office Live in November 2005, and the company is grooming the product -- which gives small businesses tools for building a Web site as well as Web-based e-mail, instant messaging, collaboration and customer relationship management -- to be one of its top sellers. In his keynote at the partner conference Tuesday, Turner said that the hosted service will eventually become one of Microsoft's most popular products alongside long-time top revenue-earners like the Windows client OS and the Office desktop productivity suite. "We do believe it will reach our top three or four largest deployed applications we have around the world," he said. That's a tall order, but at least one partner who is offering an application for small legal firms on the Office Live Marketplace said he thinks Turner's prediction will come true. "The numbers add up and the demand is there," said Joe McDermott, managing director for Solution Canvas Ltd. in Glasgow, Scotland. He said it's been traditionally difficult for small businesses to find IT products tailored to them, and Office Live meets many of their needs. More importantly, he added, broadband is now ubiquitous and more people accept and use online services such as banking, every day. Small businesses are more comfortable going straight to the Web for an IT infrastructure rather than buying and installing products on site themselves. To improve Office Live, Microsoft in the next two months will enhance the service with more options for subscribers to buy ad words on search engines other than Microsoft's Windows Live Search. Currently, subscribers can use the service's AdManager user interface to buy ad words through AdCenter, Microsoft's paid search platform. Microsoft will extend that ability to other search engines, though it is not ready to disclose which ones yet, Koopmans said. In the same time frame, the company will add the ability to build e-commerce sites in Office Live's tool for building Web sites, she added.
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EnterpriseWizard this week is releasing the 2.0 version of its CRM application, a product built on top of its SaaSWizard Web application development platform and designed to be easily customizable.
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Microsoft has rolled out an update to its CRM&#160;suite in eight of 25 languages that the software will eventually support.Dynamics CRM 4.0 is now available in Danish, English, Finnish, Dutch, French, German, simplified Chinese and Spanish, Microsoft announced Wednesday. The company begins a 12-week global tour this week to launch the suite, which is available for both on-demand and on-premise deployments. The company first released code for the software to partners and customers in December.Over the next three months Microsoft plans to roll out the suite in 17 other languages -- Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Greek, Hebrew, Hong Kong Chinese, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, traditional Chinese, and Turkish.Microsoft added multitenant capabilities with version 4.0 of the product, which means a single instance of the software on a server can serve multiple customers when the suite is running as a hosted service. The company also added more support for global companies, giving customers a single view for managing accounts worldwide and adding support for multiple currencies.Microsoft also has created integration between data in Dynamics CRM and its Office Excel spreadsheet software. Users can import CRM data to Excel and refresh it from live CRM data while they work, using controls from within Microsoft Office. This allows them to use Excel&#39;s data-analysis tools with their CRM data, according to Microsoft.The Dynamics CRM launch tour will travel to Barcelona, London, Madrid, and Vancouver on some of the first stops in the 50-city, 20-country tour.
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Microsoft continues to prepare for the third-quarter launch of itsÂ Dynamics Live CRM serviceÂ with Tuesday's announcement of initial pricing and product information.
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REDMOND, Wash., Dec. 15  /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Microsoft Corp.  today announced that W.C. Bradley Co. has selected Microsoft Dynamics(TM) GP to handle its corporate enterprise resource planning (ERP) functions, including aggregation of data from multiple divisions of the company.
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com September 16, 2004, 7:58 AM PT. This fourth priority&#39;s main focus has been improving or obtaining CRM and ERP software for the past year and a half.
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(InfoWorld) - Just a day afterÂ debuting a new initiative to produce more industry-specific functionalityÂ for users of its Dynamics business applications, Microsoft Tuesday announced it had purchased IP (intellectual property) and code relevant to the manufacturing sector. Previously, Microsoft relied on its partners to meet the industry-specific needs of its customers, but in response to feedback from those communities, itÂ is now working to add in capabilities to its ERPÂ applications in five key vertical markets -- manufacturing, distribution, retail, services, and the public sector. Microsoft said Tuesday at its Convergence conference in San Diego that it has acquired the IP and code for eBECS's lean manufacturing module. EBECS is a Microsoft partner and reseller of Dynamics AX based in Chesterfield in the U.K. The companies didn't reveal any financial details around the deal. Lean manufacturing is an approach designed to streamline manufacturing, ensuring the shortest time between receiving a customer's order and shipping that order by getting rid of any inherent waste of resources involved in the manufacturing process. Microsoft will use the eBECS module to extend the existing core functionality of its Dynamics AX ERP software so that users can better optimize their processes and connect and integrate their entire supply chains from their customers through to their supply partners, according to Glenn Bray, senior director of Microsoft's industry solutions. By the end of this year, Microsoft will make the English-language module available to its customers, with plans to integrate the code into the next version of Dynamics AX and fully localize it to support all of the 40 languages in which its ERP software is available. Partners who've been trying to attract high-end customers told Microsoft that they were keen for the software giant to become more proactive about industry-specific offerings. "They want Microsoft to stand behind a solution," Bray said. Customers are keen to know they can still count on Microsoft's support should a particular partner change the focus of their business to a different industry or run into some kind of trouble. Microsoft highlighted acquisition as one way it plans to build in additional vertical functionalities to its Dynamics ERP families along with internal development and strategic alliances with its partners. Back in January, the vendor announced a co-development effort with public-sector information management software vendor Tyler Technologies. The two companies are working together to provide public-sector accounting functionality for Dynamics AX with an enhanced version of the ERP software due to appear in the latter half of 2009. Looking ahead, Microsoft expects to create multiple relationships with partners in each of its five chosen industries, Bray said. He doesn't believe that Microsoft getting more involved in providing industry-specific functionality will lead to cannibalization of existing offerings from its partners. There'll be no requirement for partners, for example, to use Microsoft's own lean manufacturing module, Bray said. Instead, partners will be free to choose whichever software is most appropriate for them, so offerings from Microsoft and its partners addressing the same industry needs will coexist. Â
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com October 4, 2004, 5:39 PM PT. This fourth priority&#39;s main focus has been improving or obtaining CRM and ERP software for the past year and a half.
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8/24/2004 -- Cisco Systems yesterday announced a new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Communications Connector for Microsoftâs CRM offering.
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com September 13, 2004, 8:47 AM PT. This fourth priority&#39;s main focus has been improving or obtaining CRM and ERP software for the past year and a half.
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com September 29, 2004, 2:57 PM PT. This fourth priority&#39;s main focus has been improving or obtaining CRM and ERP software for the past year and a half.
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Microsoft is offering a new subscription model to small businesses that will allow them to use the company&#39;s software for less cost than the currently available licensing model.The plan, called Open Value Subscription program, is part of Microsoft&#39;s effort to give small businesses more flexible and affordable options for purchasing software, said Cindy Bates, Microsoft&#39;s general manager for U.S. small business.The new plan costs about a third of the license-only expense for the current licensing program open to small business, called the Open Value program, Bates said. The plan is cheaper because Microsoft offers upfront discounts for software purchased through the subscription program, and also allows customers to increase or decrease pricing over the three-year subscription period if their business needs change, she said.Open Value Subscription includes Microsoft&#39;s Software Assurance program, the company&#39;s software maintenance and support program for business customers.Microsoft defines small businesses as those with 50 employees or fewer. Bates called 50 employees the &quot;break point&quot; for when a company hires IT management. Up until that number, &quot;usually it&#39;s the business owner or office manager&quot; handling the IT system, she said.Businesses will be able to sign up for the Open Value Subscription program beginning in March, Bates said. Microsoft products available through the program include Microsoft Office Small Business, Office Professional +, Windows Vista Business Upgrade, Small Business Server Client Access License (CAL), Core CAL, Desktop Professional Suite, and Small Business Desktop Suite.As part of its small-business outreach, Microsoft also this week is unveiling a partner program called &quot;Big Easy,&quot; which invests about $10 million in subsidies to small businesses purchasing products through partners.Through the program, small businesses purchasing certain products through authorized specialist partners will get a certain percentage of money back that they can use to purchase other services from those partners, Bates said.For example, a small business would get a maximum of 22 percent of the money it spends if it buys six or more products that are on the approved list. Bates said Microsoft has figured the average return will be about 15 percent to 17 percent on purchases for small businesses.Products available for subsidies under the Big Easy program include Microsoft Office products, Exchange Server, Forefront Security for Exchange Server, System Center Essentials, Project, Visio, Office SharePoint Server, Forefront Security for SharePoint, and Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2006, among others.More information about Open Value Subscription can be found on Microsoft&#39;s Web site. The company also provides more information about the Big Easy on its Microsoft Small Business Community Blog.
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com September 20, 2004, 11:23 AM PT. This fourth priority&#39;s main focus has been improving or obtaining CRM and ERP software for the past year and a half.
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Microsoft Corp. is finally launching its long-awaited CRM service at its Business Solutions Conference in Denver this week.
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Adobe lowers the price of its Shockwave graphics tool which adds support for Ageia PhysX and DirectX 9.