Newsmaker: Is Microsoft bringing CRM to the masses?

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So we have been aligning our licensing model with our technology model to allow our partners to host Microsoft CRM for their customers. What we are not doing is putting up a big Microsoft CRM hosted Web site. We are really enabling it through our partner network, which I think works very well, because our partners can do vertical deployments and they have a lot of flexibility that doesn't exist in typical hosted environments.

When you talk about partners, who are you talking about?
Wilson: All of our partners will be able to do hosting--what we call our Service Provider License Agreement Program--but our model is not to mimic somebody else's business model, it's to bring Microsoft's specific strengths into the market. Our ability to have a package that is very easy to customize, that leverages our big partner network.

So the aim is to make it CRM that every company can use?
Wilson: Yes, your front-desk assistant will have just a little bit of CRM to book appointments for people, and your head of sales operations will have a much broader and deeper view across the company.

Is Microsoft trying to address a specific weakness in the market with CRM 3.0?
Wilson: This is a very easy platform to customize. For example, if you want to create a vertical application for a city council, you can easily add new data objects, not found in a standard CRM database model, that reflect what councils have to do. You can rename existing system entities, and you can add new entities--all without writing any code. It will automatically generate all the data stored, (and) all the screens you need, and it will automatically generate the Web services that you connect to on external systems.

You can get our CRM through Outlook, through a browser, through a Windows mobile device. We've got a very broad footprint.

Just one example is being able to create very unique instances of the application using very common tools and very common technologies. That's been a big Achilles' heel for CRM. If you wanted to customize an enterprise CRM application, you had a very complex, proprietary tool set that most organizations didn't know and couldn't maintain, but with Microsoft CRM we have really simplified that. We have done it in a way that it's all driven by application metadata, so it is very upgradable and portable.

That is a very big differentiator for us: deep verticalization and deep customization that you can do using standard technology.

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[kjellsj]

customization tool set

It is not just that most organizations are not capable of understanding and using proprietary tool set to configure and maintain their CRM system; it is not uncommon that even consultants from the large CRM vendors are not able to do this either. E.g. the Norwegian CRM system 'growBusiness Solution' has a very low-level XML configuration mechanism with hard to understand techno-babble documentation, and the "tool set" is basically Notepad. I have used both, and MSCRM is superior when it comes to easy, visual configuration of the application and database. In fact, we let the client superusers configure MSCRM themselves after only a few hours of training.

[machine208]

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