Rivals respond to Microsoft's CRM plans
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Blog: Salesforce.com, SugarCRM find bones to pick with Microsoft's depiction of its hosted Live CRM plans.
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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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Salesforce.comÂ is starting to provide some details about the next version of its hosted CRM (customer relationship management) software, including the product's primary focus, which will be customization.
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Analysis Over the past few years, CRM implementations have come in for much criticism, especially in the elusive area of ROI. This has caused many companies to re-evaluate their technology implementations
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CRM customers will be listening this week when Mike Lawrie takes the stage at the Siebel Systems Inc.&#39;s user conference in Los Angeles for his first public appearance as CEO of the customer-relationship-management software pioneer.
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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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SAN JOSE, Calif.  -- Seeking to be more competitive with Microsoft Corp...
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TechWeb - The new software will be available for customers and hosting partners to download online. CRM 4.0's multitenant architecture gives the company and hosting partners the ability to host CRM in much higher volumes, setting the stage for a showdown with Salesforce.com.
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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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Pouring fuel on the debate over whether IT provides a competitive advantage to corporations, a pair of prominent industry observers Monday offered starkly different views of the role computer technology can play in transforming business strategy.
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Taking a page from major enterprise software providers like Oracle and SAP, Microsoft announced this week Business Ready Customer Care, an initiative that includes major enhancements to its maintenance and support program for Microsoft Dynamics, ERP and CRM, applications.The customer support initiative does three things: Extends for five years the time over which Microsoft will support its products; offers more creative financing solutions for buying its CRM and ERP products, and promises to create a more transparent environment for its channel partners and their customers about future upgrades and products.Industry analyst Josh Greenbaum, principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting, said the fact that Microsoft is offering an additional five years of software support is in recognition of how well Oracle's extended support program is working for its customer base.Under the new Microsoft program there will be a total of five years of "mainstream" support for its products plus an additional five years of extended support, according to Christine Bell, director of global services product management, for Microsoft Business Solutions.Greenbaum says the extended support is a smart move on Microsoft's part."Oracle found out that extending support for their applications does not mean customers are gong to stall on [buying] new releases. They [Oracle] have a good upgrade flow despite or maybe because of extended support," Greenbaum said.In today's market, most vendors make upgrades a revenue-neutral event."You still get maintenance revenue either way, so why cause anxiety when you don't have to," added Greenbaum.On the financing side, Microsoft is now offering more options, including financing both the cost of hardware and software.Also available through March 2008 is a program called Smart Pay which will allow customers to select what their monthly payments will be for the first year.Finally, Bell said that Microsoft is making the commitment to deliver statements of directions that look out to the next 12 to 14 months."It will be very specific and talk about features and functionality," said Bell.Microsoft will include written documents on a special partner and customer Web site and will not require signing a non-disclosure agreement.The roadmap details are expected to start in November.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft plans to reduce the price its partners will pay for its newest customer relationship management software, code-named Titan, the company's latest foray into software-as-a-service (SaaS) CRM.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft partners introduced to the company&#39;s software-plus-services strategy this week at its Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) applauded the plan, though they noted a few challenges as the company makes the transition from selling business software to offering more hosted and Web-based services.
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Taking a page from major enterprise software providers like Oracle and SAP, Microsoft announced this week Business Ready Customer Care, an initiative that includes major enhancements to its maintenance and support program for Microsoft Dynamics, ERP and CRM, applications.
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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.
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With its eye firmly fixed on rival Salesforce.com, Siebel unveiled OnDemand Release 6 of its hosted CRM suite of applications last week, the first industry-specific version of its hosted software.
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Executives at Salesforce.com say they don't fear Microsoft's entry into the hosted CRM business.