Here were some of my favorite quotes:
""I just went on a call for CRM and the VP of sales just keeps pushing Salesforce, Salesforce, Salesforce and he'll find a flaw in anything else no matter what you implement," says Jeffrey Goldstein, managing director of New York-based Queue Associates Inc., a Gold Certified Partner.
Forrester Research Inc. analyst William Band says while Microsoft Dynamics CRM has gained appeal, outpacing Salesforce.com could be a high bar to clear.
"In order for Microsoft [Dynamics] CRM to become a billion-dollar business, the market has to grow more or somebody else has to lose a lot of market share," Band says. "I don't know that there's that much space in the marketplace for Microsoft CRM to get that big. I don't know where another billion would come from."
A further source of frustration for Goldstein is the $49 per month price tag for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, which he says is far less expensive than Salesforce.com, yet customers aren't swayed by that. Price and feature comparisons are not the issue, Goldstein says. "The problem we run into is so many VPs of sales and ex-sales people just have a history with Salesforce. They just ask for it by name and they just refuse to use anything else," he says.
So what's in this upcoming release for Microsoft CRM 2011? According to the article, here are the key features:
"Outlook Integration: Users can manage their CRM interactions from within Outlook. CRM data can be treated like any other Outlook data.
Ribbon: The Office Ribbon added to the new Outlook also will be added to the new Dynamics CRM client.
Role-Tailored Design: Users access relevant forms based on their role in the organization and are restricted from accessing data they're unauthorized to view.
Inline Data Visualizations: Users can create charts, drill down into them and share them.
Real-Time Dashboards: Customers can provide real-time dashboards to assess business performance.
Solutions Management: Developers and IT managers can package up all customizations and install them into the system and they can stay protected from others inadvertently overwriting them.
Field-Level Security and Record-Level Auditing: Important to any organization where privacy and/or compliance are required."
This isn't exactly material that will steel market share from Salesforce.com. These features have been standard with Salesforce.com for more than 5+ years. By comparisson, in it's upcoming Winter'11 release, Salesforce.com is deploying:
Chatter: Probably the most talked about Salesforce.com feature in the past few months, Chatter asks the question, "What are you working on?" It brings social media into the CRM tool, giving Salesforce.com a Twitter or Facebook like facelift. It seems to be making a real difference in user adoption among the companies that are deploying it in production.
Outlook 2010 Integration: This release will have a number of key (and much needed) improvements related to Outlook 2010 integration, including: email added indicators, improved Outlook administrator settings, increasing # of characters supported in the Subject field, 64-bit OS Support, simpler synch features and scheduled sync functionality.
Reports, Dashboard Improvements: Salesforce already has very powerful reporting and analytic features built in. In the Winter'11 release, there are a number of improvements targeted toward this Salesforce.com feature: drag & drop report columns, drag & drop dashboard features, improved report sorting functions, ability to run Dashboard reports as "current user", ability to change the running user in real-time, improved chatter integration, and more.
Improved Search functions: ability to search Content (document libraries), improvements to the advanced search features.
Improvements to the Change Sets deployment features
Improvements to Sites (web site hosting inside Salesforce.com), including support for 30x redirection
These are just a few of the features that Salesforce.com is rolling out at the request of Salesforce.com Customers (via their IdeaExchange forums). On top of all this, we're going to see some nice new functionality related to VMforce, Chatter, calender scheduling, consoles, and more.
Salesforce.com weighs in with a heavier price tag, but it remains easier to implement, easier to customize, and contains more functionality "out of the box" than it's Redmond competitor. Salesforce.com remains my preferred CRM in the competitive marketplace.
I love that you can say "Chatter: the most talked about feature in the last few months." Months? For other companies, Google and Apple included, a feature like that would be several years' worth of a talked-about advance. After Apex/Visualforce, Sites, Idea/Answers/Knowledge and now VMForce, paradigm-breaking features released at breakneck speeds seem the norm from Salesforce.com.
ReplyDeletePace of innovation is key:
ReplyDeleteMicrosoft 4.0 came out in Dec.2007 and 5.0 is still not out so that's some 3 years between major improvements. If you're on-premise or vendor hosted you'll also need to add the time and cost to upgrade to 5.0, then deal with the major UI changes. Not sure about you, but I'm referencing MS Office help for the first time in 15 yrs due to new ribbon UI – no thank you.
Contrast Salesforce.com releasing 3 upgrades per year and customers AUTOMATICALLY enjoy these upgrades due to the multi-tenant design. No complex, risky or expensive consulting projects for Salesforce customers to enjoy new releases. Gradual improvements also eliminates the pain, cost and risk associated with massive changes.
The days of disruptive upgrades every 2 to 4 years are over!
Salesforce.com is no doubt the competitor to beat in CRM and PRM solutions. But I must say that channel management solution is not limited to just one name.
ReplyDelete