4 CRM Giants: Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle and SAP

While the Dynamics CRM umbrella would appear to give unification to the Microsoft CRM offerings, the picture still seems a little confused. Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Parature from Microsoft, Microsoft Dynamics Marketing and Microsoft Social Engagement are the company’s business applications that enable companies to market smarter, sell effectively and productively, said Angela Bandlow, senior director, Product Marketing, Dynamics CRM. While they are available in the cloud and on-premise, it would appear that more work is needed to slim down the number of brands and products. That said, Microsoft just acquired another couple of companies in this space: FieldOne, a provider of field service management, and FantasySalesTeam, a sales gamification platform.

A release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM earlier this year stressed intelligent customer engagement. This included its integration with Office 365; a social center where marketing, sales and service teams can monitor social topics; an identical user experience across mobile devices, including a “configure once, deploy everywhere” model; PowerBI Connectors added for Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Dynamics Marketing; and integration with Parature for knowledge management.

“We advise customers to carefully consider how intuitive is the user experience, how well will it scale and how easy is it to adjust to the needs of the business as a vital part of the selection process,” said Bandlow. “For those starting with a single departmental application, we urge them to consider early on how they will eventually get to an end-to-end customer engagement solution.”

SAP