DENVER--Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner said Thursday that there was a good reason that partners complained last year that the company was short on details on its "Software Plus Services" strategy.
"The reason we didn't share it with you is we didn't have it figured it out," Turner said. And although the company announced more details this week, Turner said the company is still trying to figure out just how to add services.
"We're continuing to re-evaluate, re-look at, re-examine the opportunities," he said in a wrap-up keynote speech at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference here. "We hope you will join us in figuring it out."
Turner also encouraged partners to help the company in its fight to have its new Office Open XML file formats recognized as an open standard by the International Organization for Standardization. "We need to win this vote for an open standard," Turner said.
Turner concluded with an inspirational story of Logan Olson, a young woman who suffered a brain injury several years ago. With the help of Windows Vista and accessibility software from Microsoft's partners, she now puts out her own publication, Logan Magazine.
Competitors were quick to respond to Microsoft's latest plans for hosted CRM.
Microsoft's pricing was clearly aimed squarely at Salesforce.com, which was quick to dismiss Microsoft's entry into the market, noting that the company has been talking about its plans for sometime without actually releasing the product.
"I think that Microsoft has announced this service more often than Roger Federer has won Wimbledon," Bruce Francis, Salesforce VP of corporate strategy, said in a statement.
Another rival, SugarCRM, took issue with the notion that rivals don't offer the option of moving from a hosted to an on-premise model, saying that it offers just that choice.
"SugarCRM has been providing the ability for customers to swap deployments from on-demand to on-site and vice versa since December 2004, and we have had dozens of customers who took advantage of this," Tara Spalding, SugarCRM's vice president of corporate marketing, said in an e-mail.
DENVER--Microsoft on Tuesday detailed the pricing for its Dynamics Live CRM product, the hosted version of its customer relationship management (CRM) software.
The professional version of the software will list for $45 per user per month, though during 2008 it will sell for $39 per user per month. The higher-end enterprise version, which includes offline data access, will sell for $59 per user per month.
Microsoft will offer the professional edition of the product at no charge, starting this quarter and through the end of the year as part of an early access program.
In an effort to keep its partners happy and enlist them to sign up hosted customers, Microsoft is paying partners 10 percent of the subscription revenue on a recurring basis, as contrasted with some rivals that pay a commission only on the first year's revenue.
"We are going to pay our partners year after year," CRM general manager Brad Wilson said in an interview. Wilson added that partners can play a key role even when Microsoft is doing the hosting.
"I think most customers would strongly benefit from having a partner to help them," he said. It's nice to have somebody who has done it 50 to 100 times to help you with it."
Because the hosted version is based on the same "Titan" code as the on-premise version, Wilson said, customers will be able to move between the two options, with partners standing to get traditional software margins for customers that shifted to hosting it themselves.
"That's something a competitor can't do," Wilson said.
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