Enterprise applications Toolkit

How Microsoft plans to make its mark in CRM

Tags:
Cases,
Flexibility,
Crm,
Licence

Colin Barker ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 27 Nov 2008 16:21 GMT

...we haven't had a customer launch before [this month].

So presumably these are intended to deal with the view that Microsoft has not been in the CRM market very long and that, to understand and execute sophisticated CRM, you need a specialist supplier?
The wildly less popular ones? The ones that have had staggering adoption problems over the past 10 years? I think there is really a philosophical difference [between Microsoft and those suppliers]. We are not going to give you a gigantic list of features. You know how you want to run your business.

So, for us, user adoption is key. If they [the users] are not going to use the system, you are pretty much guaranteed a failed deployment.

We give you enough flexibility so that you can run the system how you want to. So I find we will beat a classic offering from your CRM vendors on end-user adoption and platform flexibility. Those factors will far outweigh the fact that other people have more pre-built stuff.

We went into a sales opportunity against a classic CRM vendor and measured its software. Out of the box, its software had only a seven percent fit [only seven percent of the software could be run without modification].

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When you think about it, it is very difficult to sit in Palo Alto or Redwood and design something that is going to fit any business — a system that will work with every business in the world, whether it is in Turkey or South Africa. So the key now is flexibility. How easy is it to add the stuff we need?

I think the old model of 10 years ago, where you built a system that had a big slab of stuff that you had to adopt, has gone.

At the same time, we will still bring out our accelerators with pre-packaged software, and more and more of them. But we release them as open source. The idea is that we just put this stuff out there and let people use it. And, if our partners use it, all the better.

So are these products free?
Yes.

But you are charging people for the software.
You have to buy the core licence but, once you have bought it, we are not going to try and nickel and dime people for bits of process and functionality. We don't believe in that.

We are taking the approach of wanting to make CRM much more affordable. Affordable in terms of TCO [total cost of ownership].

Part of that is in the core. We think we've done a pretty good job there and we keep adding pieces of incremental value through the accelerators. Even in the on-demand space, we want to go in and make it more affordable. CRM in on-demand tends to be relatively overpriced. So we want to make that price come down.

How do you charge? It is on a licence basis?
We have a server price and a user price — what we call a server licence and a client-access licence. The server price is nominal, relatively low and doesn't tend to go up. The primary driver of price is how many people use it.