Will this be available on a Salesforce.com model?
With CRM 3.0 we are introducing subscription-based pricing. You can pay
us monthly to use the software with no upfront licence purchase. You go
through one of our partners and you will end up paying us for as much
as you use every month — no more, no less. If you stop using it, you
stop paying us. So we have been aligning our licencing model with our
technology model to allow out partners to host Microsoft CRM for their
customers. What we are not doing is putting up a big Microsoft CRM
hosted website. We are really enabling it through our partner network,
which I think works very well because our partners can do vertical
deployments and they have a lot of flexibility that doesn't exist in
typical hosted environments.
When you talk about partners, who are you talking about?
All of our partners will be able to do hosting — what we call our
Service Provider Licence Agreement Program — but our model is not to
mimic somebody else's business model, it's to bring Microsoft's
specific strengths into the market. Our ability to have a package that
is very easy to customise, that leverages out big partner network, that
is really our approach.
So the aim is to make it CRM that every company can use?
Yes, your front desk assistant will have just a little bit of CRM to
book appointments for people and your head of sales operations will
have a much broader and deeper view across the company.
Is Microsoft trying to address a specific weakness in the market with CRM 3.0?
This is a very easy platform to customise. For example, if you want to
create a vertical application for a city council you can easily add new
data objects, not found in a standard CRM database model, that reflect
what councils have to do. You can rename existing system entities and
you can add new entities, all without writing any code. It will
automatically generate all the data stored, all the screens you need
and it will automatically generate the web services that you connect to
on external systems.
Just one example is being able to create very unique instances of the application using very common tools and very common technologies. That's been a big Achilles' heel for CRM. If you wanted to customise an enterprise CRM application you had a very complex, proprietary toolset that most organisations didn't know and couldn't maintain, but with Microsoft CRM we have really simplified that. We have done it in a way that it's all driven by application metadata, so it is very upgradeable and portable.
That is a very big differentiator for us. Deep verticalisation and deep customisation that you can do using standard technology.
