It’s time to start thinking about SF – what do you think

I was wondering what was going with SF and Microsoft Deal and finally found the answer.

Hosk Final thoughts

It’s an odd day, I always thought of Salesforce as the natural competitor with Dynamics CRM and although Microsoft were behind (after starting late as usual) it felt to me like they were improving at a faster rate, Microsoft were applying the pressure on Salesforce and that perhaps Salesforce would have struggled with their finances and with Microsoft in the end winning the war.

I appreciate Salesforce are not the enemy but it’s good to have a common foe to rally against.

This partnership seems to give Salesforce a bit of renewed hope and has taken away some of the main competitive advantages Microsoft CRM had over Salesforce (e.g. compatibility with the Microsoft stack) but the actual integration won’t happen until 2015 which is quite a distance in the future

I guess Microsoft have bigger fish to fry and need to get as many people as possible using Microsoft Phones, Tablets and Office 365 but it’s not great news for Microsoft Dynamics CRM re-sellers.

In some ways I wonder with the introduction of CRM online and the new social listening and marketing functionality whether Microsoft are looking at selling Microsoft Dynamics CRM almost as off the shelf software (and not as the XRM tool).  The new helpdesk functionality also lends itself to customers using the system without having to do lots of customizations.

This doesn’t really fit in with big customers who take CRM because they like to have CRM on Premise (don’t get me started with the delayed roll out of features to on Premise) so they can keep their own data and these projects usually involve a lot of customizations.

It seems a bit sad that Microsoft is sacrificing the main advantages Microsoft Dynamics CRM has over it’s main competitor for the greater good of Microsoft’s operating system and mobile offerings.

We shouldn’t forget this maybe annoying Microsoft is also adding loads of new features and software into Microsoft Dynamics CRM at a rapid rate that I think Microsoft Dynamics CRM is still moving forward and will still be making ground on Salesforce but perhaps not at the rate it was previously.

I also don’t think this spells the end or slowing investment in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, it wouldn’t make sense for them to have invested in Microsoft Dynamics so heavily with the recent acquisitions if they were planning on slowing down investment.

You cannot deny that Satya Nadella the CEO Microsoft is certainly making some dramatic decisions and there seems to be a plan of some kind but at the moment it’s not quite clear what direction Microsoft is heading and how this is going to effect all the parts of the Microsoft organisation.

Extracted From - http://crmbusiness.wordpress.com/2014/06/03/understanding-the-microsoft-and-salesforce-partnership-why-and-what-now/

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