Admitting that its customer relationship management (CRM) solution may have been immature when it entered the market two years ago, Microsoft is confident the latest version due for international release today will finally spur adoption.
"Time to market was a big concern when the product was first developed, but version 3.0 is a much more mature product that focuses on end-user adoption," says Derek Kudsee, manager of the business solutions group at Microsoft SA.
One of the biggest inhibitors to adoption of earlier versions of MS CRM has been a lack of scalability beyond 500 concurrent users, but Kudsee says this problem has been solved through subsequent development and version 3.0 can scale to ten times more users.
The latest version includes a marketing module in addition to the basic sales and services modules, as well as a hosted CRM offering, both limitations in earlier versions that Kudsee concedes may have inhibited adoption.
MS CRM 3.0 has been designed to meet market demands for greater marketing functionality as well as the increased demand for hosted CRM from small and medium organisations as well as larger organisations, says Kudsee.
"Smaller organisations are beginning to see the cost benefits of hosted CRM, while larger organisations want to own the CRM infrastructure used by subsidiaries to enable a customer centric model through using a single, common database," he says.
Having addressed the scalability, marketing and hosting shortcomings, Kudsee says MS is confident of expanding its CRM market share for small and medium enterprises because of the low cost of ownership and high level of integration with other MS business applications.
"I am excited about MS CRM 3.0 because of the innovation that makes people productive and enables them to interface with CRM unlike any platform I have seen before, but the real test will be in the market response," says Kudsee.
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