Playing catch-up in the on-demand customer relationship management market,
Microsoft announced the general availability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Online with aggressive pricing and data storage options that seek to take
business away from Salesforce.com.
Dynamics CRM Online is a full suite of
on-demand sales, marketing and customer service applications along with
business process automation and workflow automation, said Bill Patterson,
Microsoft's director of product management for the online CRM
package.
To try to entice Salesforce.com customers to switch to Dynamics CRM
Online, Microsoft is undercutting Salesforce.com's prices and offering more
data storage capacity.
Microsoft is offering its on-demand CRM
package in two editions. The Professional Edition offers 5GB of data storage,
100 configurable workflows and 100 custom entities at an introductory price of
$39 per user per month through the end of 2008. The regular price after that is
$44 per user per month. More details on pricing and options are available at Microsoft's Dynamics CRM Online Web site.
The Professional Plus Edition provides offline data synchronization along
with 20GB of data storage, 200 configurable entities and 100 custom entities.
This package is priced at $59 per user per month.
Oracle announces the next version of its CRM On Demand software. Click here to read more.
In contrast, Salesforce.com's Professional Edition costs $65 per user per
month and provides 1GB of storage.
More than 500 organizations have been using the product for nearly eight
months as part of an early release program, Patterson said.
"For some of these businesses this is their first CRM
system; for others, they are replacing other CRM
investments such as Salesforce.com" and Oracle's Siebel CRM
On Demand package, Patterson said. Interest in the Microsoft product isn't
limited to small and midsize businesses, he said, but departments and divisions
within large enterprises are also showing an interest.
Patterson said the average deployment size is about 15 seats per customer
but some of the larger sales in the pipeline are averaging about 27 seats per
customer.
Microsoft has also been working with about 300 VARs on the product
introduction and about 150 ISVs that are building industry vertical
applications that run on top of CRM Online
or software that integrates CRM Online with
other applications.
Architecture 
