Microsoft sets pricing for hosted CRM
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Blog: The software maker details its pricing for the "Live" version of its CRM software, as well as more information on the cut partners will get for selling it.
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SEPTEMBER 08, 2004  - Open-source software start-up SugarCRM Inc. will release the first commercial enterprise version of its Linux-based open-source CRM application tomorrow, starting at $149 per seat for the first year.
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Cisco Systems Inc. is set to offer starting Monday a tool to help small and medium-sized businesses use Microsoft Corp. CRM (customer relationship management) software in combination with a Cisco IP (Internet Protocol) communication system.
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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.Microsoft has enrolled partners throughout the world to sell Titan, whose formal name is&#160;Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. Those partners will pay 40 percent less for subscription licenses for the on-demand version, the company plans to announce on Tuesday at Convergence 2007, Microsoft&#39;s European customer conference for its Dynamics business applications.Partners will now pay 40 percent less than they&#39;re paying for the previous version of the software, Dynamics 3.0. Those charges vary by country and currency, said Mark Corley, senior director of Microsoft&#39;s CRM channel strategy.Partners pay licensing fees to Microsoft based on the number of seats they&#39;ve installed for their clients, said Bryan Nielson, director of worldwide product marketing for Dynamics CRM.&quot;We give the software up front, and they pay us per use per month based on actual usage,&quot; Nielson said. &quot;They are only paying for what they use.&quot;CRM pricing models vary, but some software vendors require their partners to pay up front regardless of how many seats they sell, Nielson said. But the 40 percent price drop for partners doesn&#39;t mean that end customers will see a commensurate saving.Partners will have the power to set their own pricing. &quot;The drop in cost to partners should theoretically allow partners to reduce the price to customers,&quot; said a Microsoft spokeswoman.An executive with a Microsoft CRM partner in Europe, who wished to remain anonymous, said Microsoft&#39;s previous prices had been a bit high, but a lower price should help hosted CRM become a more attractive options for smaller companies with lesser IT funds.Some businesses liked that Microsoft CRM is delivered through familiar products such as Outlook, but were concerned about configuration difficulties, he said. &quot;Hopefully, going forward with version four there will be a product that will not only compete on price but can be configured and managed through the partner network,&quot; he said.Dynamics CRM 4.0 was supposed to be released around June or July, but Nielson said it will be released by year-end. In general, Titan delivers customer-relationship information through applications such as Microsoft&#39;s Outlook e-mail program, the Internet Explorer browser or its Office productivity suite.Microsoft is offering three versions of Titan, all of which are variations on the same code base. It&#39;s offering a SaaS option, where the applications and data are hosted on the partner&#39;s IT infrastructure. The partners use Titan as a base and then build specific enhancements onto the software for certain industries, such as real estate, Nielson said.The second option is on-premise, where the CRM software and data is on the end-customer&#39;s infrastructure. The last is Dynamics CRM Live, which is SAAS but hosted on Microsoft&#39;s infrastructure. That option will only be available in North America, although Microsoft said it plans to roll it out worldwide.The success of Salesforce.com Inc. over the last few years awoke other large software vendors such as SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft to invest in hosted offerings.Although Microsoft is not a huge player yet in hosted CRM, the company &quot;is taking SAAS more seriously that any of the on-premise players,&quot; wrote David Bradshaw, principal analyst for Ovum, in a recent analysis.Part of that seriousness has been making Titan multitenant, which means that partners can host CRM applications for multiple companies on one server and one application stack. That&#39;s more profitable for partners, wrote Warren Wilson, also an Ovum analyst, in another analysis.Also, sharing the same code base between the hosted and on-premise products saves partners from having to build multiple versions of an application, he wrote.Microsoft has also said that Titan will support multiple currencies and languages on the same server, which wasn&#39;t possible with its previous product, Dynamics 3.0, released in December 2005, although some partners created their own multitenant versions.All of the new features mean that &quot;Titan will give Microsoft a potent set of capabilities in the on-demand market and position the vendor to compete much more effectively,&quot; Warren wrote.&#160;
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In what&#39;s being called a shrewd licensing move, Microsoft last week put its competitors on the defensive and avoided price increases for customers by announcing it would not charge extra fees for server software running on dual-core, processor-based
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Computer Associates (CA) has introduced a usage-based pricing and licensing model for its mainframe management products. The model bases licensing costs on measured system usage rather than total potential
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Computer Associates International Inc. on Thursday introduced usage-based pricing for its mainframe-management products in response to customer interest in the more flexible licensing model.
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com October 7, 2004, 9:50 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) - Salesforce.com on Tuesday unveiled a new version of its hosted customer relationship management service, which it said will add a new portal and workflow management capabilities and ease the process of writing and testing new custom applications. The new version of the service comes just days after Microsoft introduced its much anticipatedÂ entryÂ into the hosted CRM business. The 23rd version of the Salesforce.com service lets users access the company's proprietary Apex Code programming language to customize their CRM applications or write new ones to run on Salesforce.com servers, the company said. "Customers can write code that runs on our servers -- it's programming without software," said Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, in a statement. The company said that Apex Code is similar to the widely used Java language and that applications written using it can be accessed via Web standards such as XML or SOAP. The new version also adds what Salesforce.com calls Intelligent Workflow, which will allow users to add rules to business processes. A new on-demand Customer Portal can deliver Web 2.0 collaborative content to customers, the company said. The Intelligent Workflow capability will come in handy at Salesforce.com customerÂ Enviance, an on-demand environmental regulation compliance software provider based in Carlsbad, Calif., said Michele Hincks, vice president of marketing at the company. Enviance has been running Salesforce.com since 2004 for sales, marketing and customer service, but the workflow management capabilities have thus far been very rudimentary, she said. The workflow tool will allow the company to use custom fields help process new customers and perform other tasks, Hincks said. She also said she expects that marketing personnel at Enviance will be able to use Apex Code to custom-build applications, so they will no longer have to wait for IT programmers to get to such projects. "It seems it will be more usable," she said. "I can cut and paste code myself." Mike Epner, vice president of worldwide services and support at Borland Software, said that his firm will create several new applications to run on the Salesforce.com platform. In addition, Borland plans to use the new version's portal to deliver technical support content to Borland customers. "The new release continues the evolution from software as a service to platform as a service," said Denis Pombriant, analyst at Beagle Research Group LLC. "Platform as a service enables CIOs to concentrate less on keeping their infrastructures running while spending more time on deriving business benefits for their companies." The new version of Salesforce.com, called Summer '07, will be available in August.
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A Microsoft partner has become the first to offer Microsoft&#39;s new unified communications software as a hosted service.Intermedia on Tuesday will begin offering Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) as a hosted service on a subscription basis for $7.95 per user, per month, said Rurik Bradbury, vice president of strategy for Intermedia. The service initially will be available to users of Intermedia&#39;s hosted Exchange service, which costs $12 per user, per month. Eventually, the OCS service will be available independently of that service, he said.Intermedia is a SaaS (software as a service) provider in New York and one of Microsoft&#39;s hosting partners. Microsoft also offers Exchange as a hosted service, and eventually plans to offer OCS as a hosted service, but has not specified when. Other Microsoft hosting partners such as USA.net and Apptix also plan to offer OCS on a hosted basis but have not done so thus far.The company is already hosting OCS for some early adopter customers, but the general rollout of the service starts Tuesday, Bradbury said. The service is aimed at SMBs that find it too complicated to install all the software on premise and administer and manage it themselves.&quot;If you think Exchange is difficult to set up for a small business, think about setting up Exchange and OCS,&quot; Bradbury said. &quot;It&#39;s an absolute nightmare for SMBs to do this.&quot;Included in the hosted OCS offering will be private, secure instant messaging and message archiving -- the latter of which is a legal requirement for companies that deal with sensitive information, such as financial services and health care, Bradbury said. The service also offers Web presence integration across Office Communicator, Outlook, and SharePoint, so a user&#39;s free/busy status is available to colleagues across all those services, and PC-to-PC voice and video conferencing.One feature of OCS that isn&#39;t in the first version of the hosted service is integration with a company&#39;s PBX (private branch exchange), but that will be available in a future version, he added.Microsoft launched OCS in October&#160;as the hub of its unified communications strategy, which aims to run a company&#39;s e-mail, instant-messaging, Web-conferencing, videoconferencing, and IP-based telephony services on one software infrastructure. Microsoft and other software providers, such as IBM, as well as traditional networking providers, such as Cisco, are competing in this new convergence space, which used to be primarily the domain of telecommunications providers.Intermedia plans to host its OCS service out of its datacenters in California, where it has three: one in Milpitas, one in San Jose and one in Sunnyvale. The company also has a datacenter in New York.
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New hosted CRM package offers customizable platform services, highlighting company's attempt to compete with SAP, Oracle, Microsoft.
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com October 4, 2004, 9:13 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 14, 2004, 2:26 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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New Salesforce.com hosted CRM lets users access Apex Code to make writing custom apps easier, adds workflow management.
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SAP is rolling out a hosted service it hopes will appeal to midsize customers that can rent the software for as little as $325 per user per month while avoiding the complexity of in-house installations.
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Blog: The software maker detailed its pricing for the "Live" version of its CRM software, as well as more information on the cut partners will get for selling it.
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Microsoft has unveiled Host Integration Server (HIS) 2004, claiming that the legacy integration application will lower the cost of integrating existing IBM mainframe and midrange systems with Windows.