Saturday, 19 April 2008
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Microsoft CRM Online Hunts Salesforce.com
The official GA release of Microsoft’s CRM Online offering is next week, and with it comes a new chapter in the life of Salesforce.com. To date Salesforce.com has lacked a major competitor that could be seen as a worthy opponent in terms of overall size, price, functionality, and marketing chops. Oracle has the marketing chops, and Siebel On Demand the functionality, but Oracle isn’t really going to challenge Salesforce.com on price. Zoho, which just launched a CRM on-demand offering, and various other permutations of both on demand and open source CRM products are able to challenge Salesforce.com on price, and maybe functionality, but Marc Benioff can frankly out-market any of these companies before he gets out of bed in the morning.
Now there’s Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. And the challenges for Salesforce.com can now begin. The goals of CRM Online are to match or beat Salesforce.com in feature/functionality, absolutely beat it in price, and with the combined power of the Microsoft brand and the ubiquitousness of the Outlook user base, seriously challenge Benioff’s hype machine on the marketing side. And they definitely have a chance at succeeding in all three.
I’m not going to parse the feature/functionality battle between the two at the individual function level here, but I can offer three main reasons why I think CRM Online needs to be taken seriously as an alternative to Salesforce.com. The first is Microsoft’s Outlook UI, known (though not always loved) by hundreds of millions of users. Love it or not, that user experience makes training for CRM Online a non-issue. Salesforce.com is pretty easy to use as well, but using Outlook is, for most desktop users, already intuitive.
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