Wednesday, September 08, 2010

Microsoft aims to sharpen its CRM pitch | Beyond Binary - CNET News

A Microsoft/Salesforce competitive snapshot

Instead of aiming squarely at Salesforce, Microsoft's Dynamics business, which includes the CRM product, tries to mimic Redmond's companywide efforts to portray itself as "all in" when it comes to the cloud. With Microsoft spending more and more of its massive R&D budget on cloud services and data centers, Park said Salesforce will have a tough time keeping pace. In explaining the strategy, Park heads to a whiteboard and draws a nine-box chart showing how Microsoft offers a combination of platform, applications, and infrastructure across servers and private and public clouds. Salesforce, he suggests, is only dabbling in a few of those categories.

And while Salesforce is profitable (it made $16.5 million in net income on $394 million in revenue last quarter), Park maintains it is not yet big enough to be a long-term competitor.

"Their business model is predicated on high-scale and they have to reach Amazon-like scale to be sustainable and they have not hit that threshold yet," Park said.

Microsoft aims to sharpen its CRM pitch | Beyond Binary - CNET News

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