Live from WPC – Day One

Posted by Mike Snyder on July 13, 2009  |  Comments (1)

I am at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans this week, and today was an interesting first day. The personal highlight for me was the announcement that Microsoft Dynamics CRM went over the 1,000,000 user mark!

I sat in on a session by Kirill Tatarinov, and I picked up a few new tidbits:

• Microsoft CRM had double digit growth in FY09
• Microsoft’s ERP products has single digit decline in FY09, but they actually took market share because the competitors did even worse
• Kirill said that ALL of Microsoft will be running Microsoft Dynamics CRM exclusively within the next 12 months!
• He presented a new nomenclature set for our competitors, which I had not seen before:
• "The Bandits"
  • Primarily two competitors
  • MSFT will beat with:
    • Role tailored UI
    • Lower TCO
    • Flexibility and ease of customization
• "The Zombies"
  • Approximately a dozen companies that use old technologies (one competitor has 192 products doing same things!)
  • MSFT will beat with:
    • Focused innovation
    • The "MSFT factor"
    • Strong partner ecosystem
• "The Force"
  • Locks customer into SaaS
  • MSFT will beat with:
    • Power of choice
    • Better customer economics
    • From "instant on" to "instant value"