Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Launches In UK

My Top 3

Microsoft’s latest version of its CRM platform has officially hit the UK streets. Dynamics CRM 4.0 promises enterprise scalability, better integration, and multi-tenancy, which are all designed to push sales out of Microsoft’s mid-market homeland and help it stake a claim in the enterprise and small business markets.

“We’ve been in the CRM marketplace for a relatively short period of time. Most of our success has been found in the mid-market, but CRM 4.0 means a significant step change. It brings significantly greater scalability,” said Paul White, UK director of the Microsoft Dynamics product group. “I’d expect our largest deployment to be 35,000 seats with CRM 4.0 in the next 12 months, but also expect to reach out to smaller businesses.”

Where a short time ago 400 seats was considered a big deployment, sales have mushroomed rapidly and today a UK government customer has 6,500 on-premise seats. In the US, one government body has a 12,500 seat contract. At the other end of the scale, sales at the small-firm end of the market are expected to benefit from the new release.

“CRM 4.0 makes it much more accessible to small and medium businesses. Our customers have an average 20 or so seats. The availability of CRM 4.0 will help convince them that CRM is a great opportunity,” said Increase director Neil Benson. He said the multi-tenant architecture had helped hosting company drive down costs for its smaller customers, as there was no longer the requirement to have one customer on one server. Now, it’s possible for a couple of servers to run many instances of CRM.

For software firm Operax, an early adopter of CRM 4 and Increase CRM customer, one of the key attractions of Microsoft’s was the ease of use. The fact that information is presented in the familiar Outlook interface was seen as a huge plus.

Chris Merrick, chief marketing officer for Operax, said: “Getting sales guys to buy into it is always hard. The sales forces are made of strong characters and driven by their own targets, so they just want to be spoon-fed stuff. Version 4 has got great enhancements in terms of the interface, integration and the fact it is multi-language is also good.”

CRM 4.0 can be deployed on-premise or delivered as a hosted application.

Source: CBR