By Varun Aggarwal, CRN, November 19, 2009, 1330
In a bid to offer stiff competition to its contemporaries in the platform-as-a-service space, Microsoft has opened up vast capabilities of its existing CRM offering. Rebranded as xRM, the offering now allows customers to use its existing Dynamics CRM to build custom applications within minutes/days instead of weeks/months.
“xRM (Anything Relationship Management) is the natural evolution of CRM (Customer Relationship Management). In today’s dynamic business environment, companies demand for ability to manage anything (x=Anything), not simply relationships with customers,” said Sushant Dwivedy, Director, Microsoft Business Solutions, Microsoft India. “Microsoft CRM sits on the .NET platform, and because of that it is much more than a traditional CRM product. A better way to think of Microsoft CRM is as a rapid development application with an out-of-the-box CRM functionality, a vast array of Microsoft applications and capable of instantly leveraging the .NET platform.”
To enable quick application developments, Microsoft is offering both click-and-use and build features into xRM Dynamics. For simple applications that include data and metadata services, user experience services, access and security services and analytical services, the platform allows you to build applications without any coding. For more complex operations like extensibility services, integration services, architecture services and platform management services, Microsoft is offering an SDK—which either the customer or partners can use to develop advanced applications.
Microsoft is partnering with specialized domain expertise ISVs to develop vertical-specific solutions over xRM. Religare Technologies, one of the partners for Microsoft xRM offering, is building applications based on xRM for brokerage firms.
A Balakrishnan, President, Business Solutions, Religare Technologies said, “With xRM, we can build new applications for our existing Dynamics CRM customers, without spending much time on development. With our domain experience in the brokerage industry, we are able to build solutions like employee relationship management for brokerages that do not require CRM, with the help of xRM.”
Other partners too are building some domain-specific solutions. Infosys has built a wholesale distribution management solution over xRM that enhances operational efficiency through automated processes, escalations and workflow, improving the end-to-end lifecycle of wholesale distributors. For several customers like government, xRM is also available in Hindi. Other languages would soon be added.
According to IDC's India Packaged Software Market Analysis and Forecast 2009-2013 report, the India Enterprise Resource Management (ERM) solutions market was estimated at $263.3 million, during CY 2008, wherein Microsoft enjoyed a share of 10 percent in revenue. In the Indian CRM market, however, Microsoft held only 4 percent market share of $140.8 million pie in CY2008. This announcement could thus help Microsoft gain more revenues and market share in both CRM and ERM space.
The platform can work in both on-premise as well as hosted environments. In fact, experts believe that the Dynamics CRM Services box in the Microsoft’s Azure platform is actually xRM application services. This would mean that even xRM would be a part of Microsoft Live offering.
xRM is Microsoft’s answer to Salesforce.com’s popular Force.com platform. But will Microsoft be able to challenge the strong hold of Salesforce.com in the platform-as-a-service offering? Only time will tell. |