Microsoft rivals Salesforce with new CRM

Bill Gates will visit London this week to boost Microsoft’s latest release in customer relationship management (CRM).

The Microsoft chairman, currently on a farewell tour as he winds down his day-to-day commitment to the company he started, is in the UK on Wednesday to promote Dynamics CRM 4.0. The new edition comes as Microsoft is showing signs of making impressions on the market.

CRM 4.0, codenamed Titan, has been widely trailed as a product that supports so-called multi-tenancy capabilities, meaning Microsoft or partners will be able to host multiple instances of the software on one server and distribute it to customers over the internet. In that sense at least, Microsoft will move closer to Salesforce.com, the big growth story of CRM in the last 10 years. However, Microsoft said that the Microsoft-hosted variant, Dynamics CRM Live is only currently available in the US and Canada and even there only as part of an “Early Access” programme. It plans to replicate the plan for the UK but there is no near-term date planned.

The product will also offer business intelligence tools, workflow capabilities for business process management, and tie in to Office 2007, for example by tapping presence awareness in Office Communications Server 2007.

“Microsoft is a mixed bag,” said Denis Pombriant of analyst Beagle Research. “Their technology has taken a major leap ahead to the point where we can talk about parity with other CRM products [but] one of the issues that most strikes me is how Microsoft is increasingly being constrained by their distribution channel. [There are] too many ways to deploy it. You can go on premises as ever and also go online and Microsoft feels this compunction to make their product available as a solution for companies somewhere in the middle who want the flexibility to migrate. So, we have some pretty good product being sold in a questionable way.”

However, David Bradshaw of analyst Ovum said that by covering so many bases, Microsoft had “a brilliant plan”.

“The most attractive offering is the one that lets have it any way you want. Software-as-a-service is just a delivery model and we shouldn’t get too religious about it. The people they’re trying to compete with are Sage, NetSuite and the bottom end of Salesforce. The sweet spot is the mid-market and possibly even the low-end of that.”

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