Microsoft’s newly discovered desire to become the CRM software supplier of choice for SMEs has, let’s face it, been greeted with more than a hint of skepticism.
Can Microsoft deliver on CRM?
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Just my personal experience to share.
The company I work for has been getting a Microsoft CRM cusomization package together for a while now. I think we started working with another company and a rep from Microsoft in… July? I don’t have first hand experience, as it’s more of a Sales thing, and I work in Inventory, but I was hearing of all these great expectations for the CRM package, and over the last ~5 months, it’s toned way down, to the point where people are a little miffed about how much it’s costing vs. how much it’s providing. We’ve scaled our expectations back pretty far, to the point where I think our only main desires are some functionality for sales forecasting, light project management stuff, and some loose record keeping.
Again, though, I’m not directly involved. All I know is that our sales people don’t take it very seriously. Also, at one point, someone was talking about having CRM somehow relate back to Inventory… but the rumor died in about a day, along with a lot of other departmental relations expectations.
I think that , at this point , the only niche to sell a CRM system is the small & medium business. They dont have the money , or they don’t want to pay such a huge licence for software like SAP,Peoplesoft or Siebel. If MS enters arena I think they have to come with a very , very cute package at a reasonable price. And I’m speaking not only about CRM. Finance , Inventory, HRMS and other goodies. Big companies with lot of money will still buy from the big three.
But there is a chance , MS has such a big amount of money they could buy in an instant companies like SAP, PS or Siebel. Look what Oracle did attempting to buy Peoplesoft.But then again,this is just a wild guess. With Bill , you never know what to expect from your very own business.
http://www.compiere.org/home/references.html
Hey! I just looked at an article about Compiere in this month’s Linux Magazine.
Compiere delivers only for Oracle while others have ports for basically every RDBMS.