Microsoft offers pay-as-you-go CRM
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Goes for small biz biz Microsoft is banking on a pay by the month charging scheme to pull small businesses onto its customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.â¦
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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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(InfoWorld) - MicrosoftÂ has taken another step to make it easier for customers and partners to customize its BI software suite. On Monday, the company announced the general availability of Dynamics CRM Analytics Foundation, a free bundle of customizable source code and documentation, for users of its CRM software. Customers and partners can use the tools "as-is" or build on them to create customized BI applications, including dashboards to run on top of Dynamics CRM 3.0, according to Christian Pederson, senior director for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Microsoft is one of several applications vendors, including rivals OracleÂ and SAP, that are all touting the benefits of "BI for the masses," or the opening out of real-time information and metrics previously reserved for managers to a company's entire work force. The software firms hope such capabilities will encourage more sales and usage of their back-end applications across enterprises. Analytics Foundation draws on Microsoft's data management and analytics capabilities contained in BI products like its SQL Server 2005 relational database, SharePoint portal technologies, Office Business Scorecard Manager, and the vendor's Visual Studio 2005 development tools suite. The bundle includes sample code, prebuilt templates, and guidelines for building BI software on top of Dynamics CRM. "We're bringing the entire BI strategy from Microsoft to life," Pederson said. Analytics Foundation will serve as an important "proof point" in that strategy, bringing together the data mining and analytics capabilities of SQL Server with Dynamics CRM, he added. A future contributor to the Analytics Foundation bundle will be a new Microsoft offering, PerformancePoint Server 2007, due to ship later this year, Pederson said. In beta testing since November, PerformancePoint is a combination of technologies Microsoft acquired whenÂ it purchased BI player ProClarity in 2006Â and its own business intelligence technologies. PerformancePoint enables users to place their data and business rules on a central server and then integrate that information with a variety of BI functionalities, including planning, forecasting, analytics, and scorecarding. Microsoft is looking to integrate PerformancePoint's features into both its Dynamics CRM and ERP applications. Pederson gave two specific user scenarios for Analytics Foundation. In one, a company could use the technologies to engage in predictive analytics around customer behavior to cross-sell or up-sell additional products. When contacted by a customer, a salesperson at the company would be able to access from Dynamics CRM not just the information related to that individual's purchase history, but also compare it with other customers' buying patterns, better positioning the salesperson to recommend other products for the consumer to buy. In a second scenario, a salesperson could use predictive analytics to better prioritize their qualified sales leads by carrying out a historical analysis of the types of leads by industry and source that have resulted in sales in the past. Dynamics CRM Analytics Foundation is now available free for Microsoft CRM customers and partners from the vendor's CodePlex project hosting Web site. It's a shared-source download, meaning that users have the right to take the tools and reverse engineer the code. Â
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Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O said on   Thursday it may offer a free, advertising-supported version of   its basic word processing and spreadsheet software, in an   apparent bid to fend off a nascent challenge from Google Inc.   GOOG.O in the business software market.
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Microsoft has launched a partner program around Office Live, which it is grooming to be a major product.
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(InfoWorld) - Salesforce.com Inc. and Google Inc. announced a strategic global partnership Tuesday, but it wasn't theÂ widely expected tight integrationÂ between Google Apps and Salesforce.com's hosted CRM (customer relationship management) software. Instead, the two vendors brought out their first jointly developed and co-marketed product combining Google AdWords with Salesforce on-demand CRM. [ See Reality Check blog post:Â  Google, Salesforce miss the mark. ] Speculation reached fever pitch in recent weeks that Salesforce.com and Google would integrate their respective hosted applications to counter Microsoft Corp.'s move into on-demand software with its Live applications, which will include a hosted version of its Dynamics CRM offering. There were even suggestions that Google was ready to acquire Salesforce.com. The two companies have a lot in common in terms of their company culture, their technologies and their belief that pay-as-you-go Internet applications will become increasingly popular. "There's a natural fit," said Kendall Collins, senior vice president of marketing at Salesforce.com, of the relationship with Google. The two vendors have been looking at where their businesses intersect and where they could both derive substantial business. They decided to work together on a new offering to target small to midsize businesses (SMBs) and integrate AdWords with Salesforce CRM. AdWords allows companies to advertise their products to people using Google's search engine and to associate their ads with specific keyword searches so the ads may appear next to particular search results. Using the new product, which is called Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords, a company can immediately connect to AdWords and create an ad linked to particular search results. Customers clicking on that ad are taken to the company's Web site and encouraged to complete a form with their contact details, which then automatically becomes a new lead in Salesforce CRM. Those leads can then be shared around the company and managed through Salesforce CRM. Users will also be able to link existing AdWords accounts to Salesforce CRM and to create new AdWords accounts, Collins said. Potential customers can try out and then purchase the new product from aÂ special micrositeÂ on the CRM vendor's Web site. The new product will immediately replace Salesforce.com's Team Edition offering, Collins said. It will be available in 14 languages and in the 43 countries where Salesforce.com operates. Under a promotional deal, the new offering will initially cost $600 for a five-user edition per year, as compared with $995 for the five-user Team Edition. The list price will end up as $1,200 per year. For users in Canada, Mexico and the U.S. who are new to AdWords, Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords also comes with a $50 AdWords credit. Under the terms of the nonexclusive agreement, Salesforce.com will take 100 percent of the $600 annual subscription fee, while Google will garner the lion's share of the advertising revenue generated, with the CRM vendor receiving a small undisclosed portion of those ad sales. Google's hope is that teaming up with Salesforce.com will enable the company to reach new SMB customers. Salesforce.com's goal is to ensure that all of its CRM offerings have some component of AdWords, Collins said. It's likely that this is the start of an intensification of the Google, Salesforce.com relationship, with perhaps the tight integration of Google Apps and Salesforce CRM to come. "Where will we go next?" Collins asked. "Stay tuned." Â
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Microsoft announced on Tuesday a program that will pay some transition costs for companies that want to move from Novell&#39;s NetWare operating system onto servers running Windows.
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(InfoWorld) - 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. Customers in North America will be able to begin using the service free under an early access program this year and Microsoft expects to start charging for the hosted CRM (customer relationship management) service in the first half of 2008, according to Brad Wilson, general manager for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The software giant made the announcements at its Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Denver. At the same conference a year ago in Boston, Microsoft CEOÂ Steve Ballmer confirmedÂ Dynamics Live CRM would be the vendor's third major Live hosted service, following on from its Windows Live and Office Live software-as-a-service (SAAS) offerings. Live CRM is one of three deployment options in Microsoft's upcoming "Titan" release of its CRM software. Titan will be the first Microsoft CRM release based on a multi-tenant architecture, using a single code base to support three types of usage -- Live CRM, an on-premise version of the CRM application and a partner-hosted release. All three deployment options share a common code base. The on-premise and partner-hosted versions of Titan should appear in the fourth quarter of this year, Wilson said. The company has yet to commit to a launch date for Dynamics Live CRM outside of the U.S. and Canada, but does intend to offer the service internationally, Wilson said. Microsoft's partners have already been hosting Dynamics CRM and Wilson stressed that the customer early access program for Live CRM will be partner-led meaning that would-be users have to go through partners to sign up for the service. Microsoft will also compensate partners annually for the customers they sign up for Live CRM. Each year, such partners will receive 10 percent of the annual SAAS subscription revenue per customer. For next year, Microsoft will offer an additional sweetener to partners increasing it to 15 percent. Microsoft plans to provide a number of different versions of Live CRM. Dynamics Live CRM Professional, aimed at companies with five or more CRM users, will be the first to become available, Wilson said. Professional is the service Microsoft will offer in its free early customer access program this year. In 2008, Professional will cost $39 per user per month in a promotional price, which will eventually be raised to $44 per user per month. The service will enable users to access CRM capabilities through Microsoft Outlook and browser clients and will include customizable workflow based on Windows Workflow Foundation. The other Live CRM release Microsoft intends to begin offering in the first half of next year is its Enterprise version, which adds in offline data synchronization on top of the Professional features. Dynamics Live CRM Enterprise will cost $59 per user per month. "The decision to allow early access to CRM Live for no fee is a pragmatic approach to attracting Microsoft-oriented prospects who have been looking for commodity sales-force automation functionality but have as of yet sat it out," Michael Maoz, vice president at market research company Gartner, wrote in an e-mail comment. "We don't expect Microsoft CRM Live will be generally available to customers until the first quarter of 2008 at the earliest, and then for North American clients only, with subsequent waves for EMEA AsiaPac." Microsoft's initial focus with CRM Live will be sales-force automation for business-to-business organizations, Maoz said, not customer service in the contact center, Web self-service or field service. Until Microsoft releases a full list of functionality for the service and how much customization of the product it will allow, customers will find it to hard to do "an apples-to-apples comparison" of Live CRM versus existing on-demand CRM from the likes of Salesforce.com and NetSuite, he added. Salesforce.com's Group Edition might be the likely rival to CRM Live and a sight cheaper than Microsoft's offering at $10 per user. "Salesforce.com is better focused from a sales and marketing perspective, selling directly and through its growing third-party partners, giving them a strong head start in the market that will be hard for Microsoft to compete with given its current go-to-market strategy, especially its dependence on partners to deliver a hosted solution in addition to the SAAS model -- the hosted offering has only a slight chance of succeeding over the next 18 months," Maoz wrote. REFERENCES:, Mar. 14, 2007Microsoft widens partner access to next CRM release, Jan. 10, 2007Microsoft to take Dynamics CRM Live in Q2 2007, Jul. 11, 2006
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Microsoft has rolled out an update to its customer relationship management (CRM) suite in eight of 25 languages that the software will eventually support.
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Feeling its way through the nuances of the Web applications market, Microsoft is shifting gears yet again with its Office Live Small Business service, this time lowering the fees and adding features for businesses establishing Web presences.
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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.
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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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Microsoft is offering a new subscription model to small businesses that will allow them to use the company's software for less cost than the currently available licensing model.
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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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(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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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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On Tuesday in Denver, Microsoft told its Worldwide Partners that the on-demand version of its customer relationship management (CRM) software will be released to early adopters later this summer, and will be available for a full market rollout in the first half of 2008.