Microsoft Launches On-Demand CRM Software into a Crowded Market

Microsoft is trying to reinvent itself as an on-demand provider of software services. And with its Dynamics CRM Online product, it's going hard after well-established players like Salesforce.com, SAP and Oracle. After having used Dynamics CRM 3.0, I am sure that the competition has to do something about it as the amount of Outlook users in the world is huge and Microsoft marketing engine will take over to push it to the global markets. What I really like in the Dynamics CRM is the ability to customize on the fly, make changes and publish to the database. I used to be a client of Goldmine Client/Server and that type of functionality did not exist.

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What's Driving Microsoft's Strategy: Virtualization, Software as a Service, Unified Communications, Online Collaboration

At a briefing in Redmond, Microsoft's Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner explains how business demands for advances in these four key areas guide Microsoft's strategy as it creates a software and services roadmaps. The change in business models is also going to impact large vendors such as Microsoft and I believe the biggest change is going to be among classic, traditional Microsoft partners that only sells infrastructure solutions such as email, collaboration without providing any additional value for end user organizations. Software plus service, cloud computing and the rest is going towards commodization where money is made in a different way.

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Microsoft Launches Dynamics CRM Online

Microsoft rolled out its Dynamics CRM Online platform today as a generally available service. The rollout represents a challenge to Salesforce.com's hosted customer relationship management (CRM) offerings. It also represents a milestone in Microsoft's general "software plus services" strategy. This release is long due and is finally there. The price is very competitive and will be a hard competitor to Salesforce.com and SugarCRM. Also, Microsoft is hosting this themselves and will include quite a lot of features and functionality such as 100 workflows in the product.

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Will MySQL Keep Lighting up LAMP? Open-source is still commercial even if people do not realize it.

MySQL leader Marten Mickos tries to calm Linux leaders' fears of MySQL abandoning the Linux market. I still keep wondering when people say that open source is free. I have been told that "there is nothing such as free lunch" and this applies to things such as MySQL as well. Now when MySQL founders and venturists have made one billion dollars in selling the RDMS to Sun, there is some feat that LAMP will become SAMP based on Sun's own operating system. If I were Sun, that is exactly what needs to be done, focusing on Sun's own application and operating system stack. I expect to see more of these transitions going forward where open source vendors get acquired by somebody that has a commerical interest in making money on the "community".

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