Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online

Posted by admin on January 21, 2011 under CRM Software | Read the First Comment

Microsoft just announced the worldwide release of Dynamics CRM Online. It will be available in 40 countries and 41 languages. With Steve Ballmer announcing the release, Microsoft clearly views this as one of the bigger steps to Microsoft entering the cloud market.  To introduce Dynamics CRM Online, they are targeting a low introductory rate of less than $35/user/month for the first 12 months which compares to $125/user/month average cost for Salesforce.com.

While there are many online CRM software solutions available in the market, this product’s target is obviously Salesforce.com which has the largest market share for cloud CRM solutions. Salesforce was one of the first to the cloud with CRM about 10 years ago.  They were lucky enough to find that cloud solutions were very accepted in the CRM space and have grown tremendously over the past decade. ERP has not found the wide acceptance for cloud solutions yet, but that is slowly changing and the subject of another post.

I haven’t seen much of the new software, but I did catch a little web demo they have on their site and saw their trusty bicycle demo example. (Microsoft’s standard demo data is a bicycle manufacturing shop.) As with all of their other Dynamics ERP solutions, they have the Office 2010 “Ribbon” concept. I would imagine that much of the functionality would match the Dynamics CRM on-premise solution – which is actually a fairly robust CRM solution.

Will Microsoft be successful? I believe in the long run they will. Will they topple Salesforce.com? Probably not, but they will give them some very interesting competition. Salesforce.com has many years and a ton of clients that are using the software. They have also been very adept at innovation and developed their Force.com development environment, which enables companies to develop add-0n software to the salesforce product. This has created a very nice ec0-system for Salesforce to move forward. They have also recently entered the ERP space with the Financial Force product, but they have a limited number of installations with that product.

Microsoft has a lot of ERP and on-premise CRM implementations in their install base. They have thousands of Value Added Resellers (VAR) and Independent Software Vendors (ISV) that work the Dynamics line. They have the money to be patient as they build up the install base. They have the tools and the infrastructure for success with Dynamics CRM Online.