Convergence 2010
I was in Atlanta last week for Microsoft's Convergence conference with a client of mine who spoke at the conference. Convergence is a conference for all the Microsoft Dynamics customers and partners to come together with the Microsoft sales and product teams and discuss the direction of the CRM and ERP product lines. I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of new faces not only from Microsoft, but many new customers and software vendors as well. In 2008 the CRM sessions were a bit empty as Microsoft 4.0 was just launched. Fast forward just 2 years and many of the CRM sessions were standing room only.
I have been working with Microsoft CRM since it's dreaded v1.0 days and the product and the space have come along way since then. SaaS was just beginning in late 2003 when Microsoft CRM first launched and the big players included the likes of Siebel, Onyx, Pivotal, and SalesLogix. In just a few years the landscape has been drastically changed with the emergence of Salesforce.com and Microsoft CRM.
The challenge Microsoft continues to have is its ability to quickly innovate the product. Salesforce.com has a release each quarter and with Microsoft its every 6 months with the CRM online product and every 3 years with the onsite product. There are CRM accelerators which are released every few months but by the time Microsoft leapfrogs Salesforce.com - they are behind 6 months later.
During my time at Convergence I was able to spend some time with the Product Management team of CRM and CRM Online. I was very pleased that both my and my client's feedback was listened to and that a number of the issues we brought up were already being worked on. My client is a large CRM Online instance and they have needs such as creating sandboxes for test environments and improved management of code. These items have already been thought through with Salesforce.com but Microsoft is quick to realize areas where they need to catch up. Dashboards will be a huge part of CRM 5.0 as this has been an Achilles heel for quite some time.
In closing it was refreshing to see the amount of innovation taking place, the number of clients who are buying into the platform, as well as hearing the incredible business results users are getting from the Microsoft CRM platform.
I have been working with Microsoft CRM since it's dreaded v1.0 days and the product and the space have come along way since then. SaaS was just beginning in late 2003 when Microsoft CRM first launched and the big players included the likes of Siebel, Onyx, Pivotal, and SalesLogix. In just a few years the landscape has been drastically changed with the emergence of Salesforce.com and Microsoft CRM.
The challenge Microsoft continues to have is its ability to quickly innovate the product. Salesforce.com has a release each quarter and with Microsoft its every 6 months with the CRM online product and every 3 years with the onsite product. There are CRM accelerators which are released every few months but by the time Microsoft leapfrogs Salesforce.com - they are behind 6 months later.
During my time at Convergence I was able to spend some time with the Product Management team of CRM and CRM Online. I was very pleased that both my and my client's feedback was listened to and that a number of the issues we brought up were already being worked on. My client is a large CRM Online instance and they have needs such as creating sandboxes for test environments and improved management of code. These items have already been thought through with Salesforce.com but Microsoft is quick to realize areas where they need to catch up. Dashboards will be a huge part of CRM 5.0 as this has been an Achilles heel for quite some time.
In closing it was refreshing to see the amount of innovation taking place, the number of clients who are buying into the platform, as well as hearing the incredible business results users are getting from the Microsoft CRM platform.
posted by Matt Rosen at
9:30 PM
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