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Microsoft Announces New Customer Relationship Management Solution | |
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| Time: 08:20 EST/13:20 GMT | News Source: ActiveWin.com | Posted By: Robert Stein | ||
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Microsoft Corp. today announced it will deliver Microsoft® Customer Relationship Management (CRM), the first Microsoft business solution built on .NET, later this year. Accessible from Microsoft Outlook® and the Web, Microsoft Customer Relationship Management will enable small and medium sized businesses to build more profitable customer relationships through increased sales effectiveness and more consistent customer service. Microsoft Customer Relationship Management is designed for rapid deployment, ease of use, and integration with Microsoft Office and Microsoft Great Plains' back-office solutions, increasing information reliability, employee usage and productivity. | ||
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| #1 By 2960 (156.80.64.157) at 2/26/2002 8:38:16 AM |
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Here we go again :(
Yet another market that Microsoft allows it's "Partners" to create and stabilize, then here comes the Mothership, vacuum in hand, ready to sweep everyone away... I'm truly astonished anyone partners with Microsoft as a Developer. It's dangerous. The more popular your product or market, the more likely you are to be mowed over by them. TL |
| #2 By 135 (209.180.28.6) at 2/26/2002 10:59:51 AM |
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Oh hell, CRM is one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in the industry.
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| #3 By 3339 (65.198.47.10) at 2/26/2002 2:06:00 PM |
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Great Plains has been in the market for a while, and their product isn't exactly cheap. Cheaper than Siebel, Oracle, and SAP, but you have to consider the CRM market. CRM is a notorious niche because staff never implement CRM's workflows, data gets ugly if not entered properly, if data gets bad the DB's usefulness is diminished, it's difficult to administer, etc... Oracle and SAP entered this space from the other side of the problem, from the side where the database's integrity and quality are paramount. Siebel has done a great job of producing a product that rivals Oracle but has traditionally focused more on CRM. So cost is a hard area to compete in depending on the size and needs of the business--also realize a lot of the $ in this area is consultation and design.
Price pressure from MS isn't going to necessarily help the business; these big players are running tight ships financially already and still the CRM market is only nascent--MS as competitor will only increase their development costs. The smaller players generally focus on SQL Server and even Access but support all ODBC databases (at least, a few years back Goldmine pushed DB2 as much as SQL). It's only now that these smaller companies are doing stuff with VBA (in a big way) or even .Net. So it's exactly now that Microsoft is screwing them. These smaller guys already sell a cheaper product than what MS is offering, and they have the extra benefit of focusing on feature sets and usability issues specific to niche markets--financial institutions, A/E and other professional services firms, lawyers, construction managment, etc... whatever the niche, in most cases there is a quality CRM product already. |
| #4 By 3339 (65.198.47.10) at 2/26/2002 6:02:42 PM |
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CRM = Customer (or Client) Relationship Management
ERP = Enterprise Resource Planning ERP incorporates SFA and is a management, planning, forecasting, marketing, allocation, warehousing, mining, etc... concept that is only relevent to large distributed enterprises CRM can be relevent to the smallest of business's but is not a simple concept: it requires tracking client interactions, forecasting activities and actions as probabilities and sales figures, taking notes for every client "event", cross linking this information, validating it and exposing it to all of the relevent staff, locking it from other staff, etc... The complexity is in the fact that some staff won't use it, some staff will put in crap data, some staff will have too much access, some staff will not have enough access (at least in my business--consulting/engineering where the staff is allowed to have their own management techniques)--this eliminates the usefulness of this data even before you can make use of the data to automate invoicing, mailers, proposals, reports, etc. So good CRM software generally doesn't have to do with the larger technological concepts: it has to do with ease-of-use and its GUI, having a standard database to accomodate most all market needs while providing the amount and degree of customization to suit particular business needs, the quality of its reporting and templated tools, and its ability to integrate well with your staff's workflows. These are the issues that MS faces if it wants to be a success, not the larger technological issues. |
| #5 By 135 (208.50.201.48) at 2/26/2002 6:48:27 PM |
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Another one that is out there is Onyx, which was started by some former Microsoft people. In fact I could have sworn that was the product MS used to use internally.
Generally CRM is simple, but the big guys like to over complicate things so as to sell large consulting contracts. It should just be an off the shelf solution with some customization and interface hooks. One thing that people forget. Microsoft doesn't create software so they can sell support and consultants. They sell the software, and put together documentation and training classes so as to help smaller companies sell the installation support and training. To me that makes any model that MS creates better than the Siebel/SAP/Oracle "We'll sell our software for $2, but you got to promise to buy $2mil in consulting from us" model as it distributes the wealth to smaller players in the industry. |
| #6 By 3339 (65.198.47.10) at 2/26/2002 7:46:26 PM |
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They weren't a hardware company either but that's gone out the window. But, your reason for saying it's a better model is my reason for saying it's a worse model. The big CRM and ERP guys SAP/Peoplesoft/etc actually do support 2-3 tiers of 3rd party consultation and development--it's not just a matter of all of us, all the time. Do you think these 2nd and 3rd tier companies are going to leave their bread and butter for MS? And do you actually think anyone can produce a CRM product that is good to go, off the shelf? It's a market that inherently requires customization, and hence, support if not consultation. Goldmine was a very simple product, but my former company still needed consultation. My current company uses a Deltek product geared towards the A/E/Consulting industry--the product is perfectly built for our business and we've still customized the hell out of it.
Try to do this successfully with an off-the-shelf poduct at a company that cannot support a full-time CRM database administrator and/or report writer... and still get something useful out of that CRM product. On the other hand, I could call our CRM provider and have them write a fair number of sophisticated reports in a few hours for a moderately princely sum, but I won't lose any time or hair. I Microsoft going to provide that? |
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