Redmond wants to refocus on the mid-sized business market, and has renamed its business solution products.
It’s not Microsoft CRM, it’s Microsoft Dynamics CRM. That was one of the changes Microsoft disclosed at its inaugural Business Summit 2005 held in Redmond, Washington.
The product line Microsoft has aimed at the medium, 50 to 1,000-person firm, has not been a big seller for the company. They have committed to making sure businesses know Microsoft has options that could help. Part of that strategy sees Microsoft now incorporating the Dynamics name into its CRM and ERP products.
They spared no firepower for the recent summit, where Chief Software Architect Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer both gave talks to attendees. Mr. Gates sees his firm’s solutions as ones that can address the management of data in a business on the desktop:
“Many of the people who we went and looked at, literally had two screens, one for their business application and the other for Office, and they would manually move data back and forth between those. You know, we saw lots and lots of notebooks out there, lots of e-mails being printed out and passed around that way, and there was no correlation between the different activities going on, it was up to the user to make those correlations.
And so people were clear to us that they want software built for their companies around their roles.”
Mr. Ballmer thinks the hosted application model will start to grow, with regards to the needs of the mid-sized enterprise:
” the best piece of software is the piece of software that they can subscribe to, as opposed to implement. Not everything will fall into that category. You may want to do a customization of our Dynamics products, ERP or CRM, that you want to have your own instance. You may want to host, because you want to be able to control not only customization, but certain operational characteristics of our products. But, I do think midmarket customers are the most open to subscribing to and using hosted business services”
Microsoft further will bundle a group of server-side products under the name Centro. That will include Windows Server “Longhorn”, the next-generation of Exchange, and security and system management tools, according to a statement from Steven VanRoekel, Microsoft director of mid-sized business solutions strategy. He envisions Centro as a single solution that will be easier to install and maintain by those businesses.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
