How Does Microsoft Fare in the CRM Race?

April 28, 2012

Social, Mobile, and Cloud. These three are the main components of CRM. All of these allow users to connect anytime, anywhere, and any way they want. And Microsoft aims to incorporate all of these elements into their Microsoft Dynamics CRM Anywhere, which is due to be launched in 2Q of this year.

In the mobile aspect, they support all major tablet and smartphone OS including iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone. On the social side, Microsoft has Facebook, Twitter, andLinkedIn integration. They even have an Activity Feed that facilitates internal communications (ergo better service delivery and happier customers). In the cloud realm, Microsoft aims to do whatOracle and SAP have already implemented – a hybrid cloud strategy.

But are the efforts of Microsoft to compete in the CRM arena enough? The blog post entitled “Microsoft – Convergence at Last?” at Free Social CRM .COM answers this sufficiently:

“What’s become increasingly clear is that Microsoft due to pressure from the bottom (customer side) up and due to pressure… generated internally is beginning to seriously open up their thinking and step up their efforts to compete in the market… Some of their thinking and actions are incredibly smart, some just table stakes, but they also remain deficient in a few critical areas that they need to make them competitive at the enterprise level particularly.”

While the new features of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM line will help them compete better with the industry veterans, they still have a lot to worry about. They have their traditional competitors like Oracle’s Fusion and Siebel CRM, SAP CRM, Salesforce.com, and Sage as well as startups that have the potential to compete like SugarCRM.

Microsoft’s activity in the CRM field has been on and off for several years that their commitment seems questionable. We have yet to see how they will manage in the functionality-and-feature war this time. Will Fast Search morph into a customer support solution, a path followed by search vendors Coveo and Vivisimo.

Lauren Llamanzares, April 28, 2012

Comments

Comments are closed.

Search the site
Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive

Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.