Microsoft offers manager on steroids

By ADAM GIFFORD

New Zealand systems integrators and independent software vendors are optimistic that Microsoft's new customer management product will boost business.

Microsoft CRM is part of Redmond's assault on the enterprise application market, adding to its Great Plains, Solomon, Navision and Axapta products.

At just over $1800 for the server and $791 for each named user, CRM is relatively cheap and has enough in it to satisfy many small- and medium-sized businesses which until now have not felt the need for specialist customer management software.

Microsoft CRM has been available in the United States for more than a year, but the New Zealand branch held off releasing it until January so some of the inevitable teething problems could be fixed.

Salestech, which has specialised in installing high-end customer management products such as Peoplesoft CRM, is taking on the Microsoft product as well.

Managing director Greg Devine said Peoplesoft CRM did not suit every organisation, and tended to be implemented enterprise-wide alongside other enterprise management applications, requiring a great deal of implementation and training.

"For medium-sized New Zealand organisations, we have not had a product we could talk to them about," he said.

"The thing we liked about Microsoft is that yes, it is version one and the functionality is not all there yet, but we know enough about the marketplace to tell a customer whether that extra functionality they need can be built in easily or not."

Microsoft CRM is like a contact manager on steroids, concentrating on sales force automation. It has only a limited amount of the service management capabilities found in packages aimed at call centres.

There is plenty to help an organisation manage leads and market, but not much for escalating service or running field service.

"Our technical staff were particularly impressed with its workflow capabilities; how it handles leads and so on," Devine said.

Complete Solutions, which sells and implements the Goldmine contact management product and Solomon business software, has also added Microsoft CRM to its portfolio.

"We see a role for both products," said managing director John Biggs.

"Goldmine is a simpler product to install and more tolerant to hardware and infrastructure, so it can be run on older machines. I see Microsoft CRM providing another plank in the Microsoft solution stack.

"There is tighter integration to Exchange.

"You are working off Active Directory and those sorts of things, so you are moving away from Microsoft as a desktop environment to much tighter collaboration on workgroups."

Call centre application developer Zeacom has developed an add-on that digs into Microsoft CRM as soon as a call comes in and displays the relevant customer information to the operator.

CRM ScreenPOP! has been in the US market since July, and Zeacom has installed Microsoft CRM itself in New Zealand, Australia, the US and Britain.

Microsoft Business Solutions CRM specialist Charlie Wood said 85 per cent of businesses had no separate customer management system, offering a huge market.