Mint Management Technologies, “Mint”, took the opportunity to share the stage with Microsoft at the recent Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 launches, held in Johannesburg and Cape Town in March.
Microsoft has laid down a strong marker in the highly competitive customer relationship management (CRM) market, with the release of its Dynamics CRM 2011.
Microsoft South Africa managing director Mteto Nyati said the need to build deeper and more profitable relationships on a broad scale was a greater priority than ever for companies of all sizes, and that CRM 2011's ability to offer the choice of on-premise or a cloud solution would open up CRM to a whole new market.
“We believe Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 is a game changer. It's the most global, productive, trusted and flexible solution in the market - and the feedback we are getting from analysts, our partners and early adopters bears this out,” said Nyati.
Microsoft has gained acknowledgement from the industry as a strong CRM market player (one of the top four), with industry experts like Forrester viewing it as a serious threat to the competition.
One of Microsoft's selling points for Dynamics CRM 2011 is that it delivers greater productivity through what it calls “familiar, connected and intelligent experiences” that aim to provide sales, marketing and service professionals with tools that are natural and personal. By gathering information that is insightful and actionable, an organisation can become more unified and collaborative.
Carel du Toit, a director at CRM specialists - Mint, says the new CRM 2011 is “de-risking” technology by delivering quick returns on investment, thanks to its underlying development framework, xRM.
“One of the things xRM does well is to help organisations quickly address shifting business priorities by supporting the rapid development and modification of applications when business needs change,” said du Toit.
“Microsoft has been able to commoditise the CRM market very successfully by lowering the barriers to entry, and we're seeing real interest in the marketplace.”
Microsoft Dynamics CRM offers solution builders such as Mint the ability to utilise and extend the application platform to suit best-of-breed and custom development scenarios. As a fully customisable and configurable platform, the ability to develop on top of the existing application platform mitigates much of the cost and complexity of traditional custom development by utilising common, pre-integrated elements and development tools.
Mint's solutions are available on-premise, in cloud or as a hybrid deployment. “Cloud deployment allows you to have your CRM secured without acquiring and maintaining IT hardware, or host it internally for ultimate control and flexibility,” says Mint's CRM Lead Kuven Pillay.
“Mint has worked with the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform since its market inception, and we embrace the challenges of getting our clients teams to use their CRM system, and use it well. With Mint's comprehensive training and support, users on all levels will experience the personal benefits required for good adoption,” says Pillay.
In answering the question of, “How does this work with my existing infrastructure?” Pillay confirms that CRM integrates with Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Active Directory, and Microsoft SQL allowing customers to bring the rich capabilities of CRM into a familiar interface of tools users and IT departments already use. This creates reliable user adoption and reduces training costs. With Mint's expertise in providing support for mobile users as well as access through a Web interface, our customers can work from virtually anywhere, online either or offline.
Mint provides CRM and CRM Mobility solutions for no less than six of Microsoft's recognised verticals, including Healthcare, Financial Services, Public Sector, Manufacturing, FMCG and Media and Research; and has achieved Microsoft Gold Certification in both the Independent Software Vendor (ISV) and CRM Competency categories.
Mint uses leading mobile and Web technologies to automate and simplify sales and service operations to deliver a world-class and real-time customer experience.
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