CRM - July 2008 - (Page 26)

MICROSOFT & CRM ment,” says China Martens, the firm’s senior analyst for enterprise software. Sporadic activity in the Dynamics line, coupled with delays and changes of direction, has only fueled backlash, Martens contends. “Microsoft is sending mixed messages,” she says. “Changing the online product’s name late in the game, launching only in North America—NetSuite, SugarCRM, and Salesforce.com are all international. People have been waiting for Microsoft for so long, they’re impatient.” There are, of course, other views.“Some have said Microsoft has no direction in CONTINUED FROM PAGE 24 it’ll be one of the fastest-growth categories in seat counts…. I think you’ll have, five years from now, a manyfold increase in the number of people who think about xRM as an extended part of their desktop environment— their Outlook desktop environment. So I’m super-enthused about the category, that’s number one. Number two, I think we come at it from the user’s perspective. I think a lot of CRM implementations have been viewed as the systems for the oppression of the sales-and-service professional. And I think you do want to be able to put some operational discipline into some of those processes. But you also want the user to feel…more productive because they’re engaged in the system. And I think the way we’ve approached that, we’re the friend of the user in addition to [the] friend of the manager. Number three, we’re committed to be available in all forms: on-premise, hosted, and in the cloud, which I think is very valuable. Number four is our commitment to being easily customized…. Nobody’s process looks exactly like somebody else’s, and yet people want to be able to customize it and not have that be a huge amount of work. I think we’ve got the customization model down so—well, I feel excited about it. And last, we want to democratize xRM, and that’s partly accessibility of the technology and that’s partly the price point. And those would be sort of key things which certainly I think might be interesting to your readers. CRM: How significant do you think social media is—or are—for enterprises today? SB: Not very today—it will be more in the future. I mean, if social networking is all about, “How do you interact with people and content in a group setting?”—that’s what SharePoint’s CONTINUED ON PAGE 28 CONTINUED ON PAGE 28 26 CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | JULY 2008 www.destinationCRM.com PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN LOOMIS about, that’s what Office Communications Server is about, it’s about even what CRM is about in a sense. It’s just a much more formal instruction set of interactions. So I do see those things combining and making sense in an enterprise setting or business setting just the way they make sense in a social setting. CRM: Well, specific to Facebook—you have some notable investment there. Can you talk about what you’re going to do with the information you get from Facebook users? Is that a marketing thing? SB: Well, we don’t really get information from the users. There are three things that are probably important: Number one, we sell ads. And we can use certain information from Facebook to sell the ads, that’s how we get to use that information in our role as an advertising partner with Facebook. Number two…there are a set of APIs [application programming interfaces] exposed to Facebook and we continue to extend the value we bring to Facebook users and the value that Facebook users bring to other Microsoft products through the APIs that are open to us to use…. And we’ll continue to do our own social networking things around SharePoint and our Windows Live offering also. CRM: Do you personally get a lot of use out of any of that? SB: I have a Facebook account. I check it, but I’m not active. You can find me—everybody can find me: There are only 10 “Steve Ballmer”s up there, and one of them is actually me. I like Facebook, but I have not yet worked it into—[and it] certainly doesn’t fit into—my personal workflow. It fits a little bit in my personal social flow, but just a little bit. Right now, it fits more in the social flow of some of my kids’ friends, frankly, than it does for me. CRM: I’ll be attacking your Zombie tonight. “Demand for on-demand CRM has just begun to be tapped; Microsoft can grab a huge corner of this market.” CRM; I beg to differ,” says Joshua Greenbaum, principal of Enterprise Applications Consulting. Greenbaum says that most customers don’t use broad enterprise CRM.“They use the basics, for which Microsoft is very suitable. There is a huge, untapped market for basic, low-cost CRM.” A keystone of MD CRM’s value proposition—one which the company is quick to highlight in marketing materials, press interviews, and launch events—is integration with Outlook and Excel, applications in use by the majority of business users. Some observers—even in this magazine— have said that Outlook integration is less a feature of CRM than it is the price of admission, and that if Microsoft can’t flawlessly integrate with its own products it should hang up its spurs. In fact, as Greenbaum says, “professionals live within the Outlook experience—that’s a huge issue.” But can Microsoft compete on other fronts? “I won’t get into a feature/functionality war; CRM has labored under delusions of grandeur—enterprisewide CRM as a goal—leading to feature bloat,”Greenbaum says. “Outlook integration, as retro as it is, is still a very 2.0 play. It reduces the pain and anguish of user adoption. The http://Salesforce.com http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - July 2008

CRM - July 2008 Contents Front Office Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point CRM’s a Social Animal SAP Looks to ‘Change the Game' CRM on Twitter CRM to the Max A Prescription for Satisfaction Required Reading Cover Story: Is Microsoft Winning the CRM Race? Jumping into the SaaS Pool Say What? Another Bright Idea Out of Edison A Small Biz Blossoms Biting Off the Right Amount Something for a Rainy Day Connect Re:Tooling Pint of View

CRM - July 2008

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