Live from WPC - CRM Live hosting from Microsoft!

Posted by Mike Snyder on July 11, 2006  |  Comments (3)

Well there have been plenty of rumors about Microsoft offering a CRM Live service, and today the rumors were confirmed! Microsoft announced at the Microsoft Partner conference that Microsoft CRM Live will be offered as a hosted service to customers and partners in the next release of Microsoft CRM! Microsoft GM Brad Wilson and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave a quick demo of how Microsoft CRM Live might look, complete with an excellent mashup of CRM with Windows Live Local.

The Microsoft® CRM Live service will be operated and managed by Microsoft within its Windows Live™ datacenters, and will offer Microsoft’s partners another fast and flexible way to solve the unique CRM needs of each customer. Microsoft CRM Live will use the same code base as the on-premise and partner-hosted versions of Microsoft CRM, a strategy that reinforces Microsoft’s leadership in allowing customers to choose the best deployment option for their business and IT needs as their business needs evolve.

We could not be more excited for Microsoft to offer this hosted deployment option to customers! Of course, customers can still purchase the Microsoft CRM software and deploy it on premise if that meets their preference. The choice is up to you.

Our experience with smaller businesses is that many of them do not have the system requirements (Active Directory, SQL Server, etc) in place to properly deploy Microsoft CRM. Therefore, this hosted Microsoft CRM Live service from Microsoft will let these smaller businesses get up and running on Microsoft CRM very quickly. Because the software is same regardless of how you deploy, Microsoft CRM allows customers the option to switch back and forth between deployment models...which of course other CRM service providers like Salesforce.com can not offer. We were so excited about Microsoft CRM Live, we even got a nice little quote in the official press release!

Microsoft Dynamics CRM allows us to deliver CRM solutions that our customers rely on to provide consistently superior service to their customers,” said Mike Snyder, principal for Sonoma Partners LLC. “The new Microsoft CRM Live service will give us even more flexibility in how we address our customers’ business and IT requirements.”

Some other tidbits on CRM Live:

• Pricing has not been announced yet, but there will be several pricing options and no limit on user counts.
• Availability is currently scheduled for the second calendar quarter of 2007.
• Early Access Programs through partners will begin this fall.
• Stay tuned to www.crmlive.com for more information.

With Microsoft CRM growing like crazy (they added over 50,000 users last quarter!), we know that Microsoft CRM Live will also be a great success.