Partners Build On Microsoft CRM With New Apps

Microsoft's long-awaited entry into this market shipped earlier this year equipped with what many in the channel call basic sales and service capabilities. The vendor's partners are now rushing to provide what Microsoft has not in terms of marketing expertise and other perks.

Microsoft "has bent over backwards" to help third parties become MS-CRM ISVs, said Andy Vabulas, president of IBIS, an Atlanta solution provider. "They want us to add value to the platform to drive more sales. We are both an ISV and a reseller."

IBIS, a longtime Microsoft and Great Plains partner, is developing a set of seven CRM applications to run on top of the Microsoft CRM product. The lineup,due late next month and slated to cost $99 per named user,includes vertical applications for the real estate, insurance, mortgage lending and financial services industries. IBIS is also fielding a "Nurture Marketing" application for planning and executing marketing campaigns to prospects, and a contact management system to ensure that customer data remains valid and accurate.

The marketing application will help users "get to work right away," Vabulas said. "It offers prebuilt customization that enables them to do campaigns and direct marketing."

Microsoft CRM definitely needs expanded functionality in campaign management, list management, telemarketing and script management, and marketing dashboards, said Terry Petrzelka, president of Tectura, a Tempe, Ariz.-based solution provider specializing in CRM.

Solution provider Green Beacon, Watertown, Mass., is finalizing a Web-based lead capture program for deployment on top of Microsoft CRM. Like other Microsoft partners, Green Beacon is aware that the vendor plans to add similar capability down the road. Still, small and midsize businesses need these functions now, said Ben Holtz, Green Beacon's president. "Microsoft will do this, but not yet," Holtz said. "We created a very simple way to capture leads with some criteria."

As prospects respond to marketing campaigns or ask for help over the Web, the software automatically captures their contact and qualification information as a new lead and triggers a qualification process, he said.

Zoomio, Boston, has developed its own hosted marketing application for Microsoft CRM. The .Net-based product, MyMarketingMachine, targets companies that may not have any CRM or campaign management capability at all. "The pricing is amazing," said Sharon Habibi, president of Syscom Technologies, an Atlanta-based IT outsourcing shop that beta-tested MyMarketingMachine. "We got our marketing group going for about $700 a month and not a whole lot of other investment."

The beauty of Microsoft's CRM product may be its simplicity, many partners said. The problem with other CRM offerings,especially in the midmarket,is feature glut, they said. There's perhaps too much functionality that is too hard to implement or even access. The issue is both technological and psychological: If a feature is too hard to use, sales reps will not use it, partners and industry observers said.

But others said simplicity lies in the eye of the beholder. One Microsoft business partner who asked not to be identified contended that the Microsoft CRM product requires buying into the entire Microsoft stack. "You need Exchange Server, you need Windows 2000, you need SQL Server 2000, you need Active Directory,this is not a trivial install," he said.

Microsoft said its CRM offering targets companies or departments with 25 to 500 employees. Pricing for the standard edition starts at $395 per user, plus $995 for the service or sales servers. The professional edition starts at $1,295 per user, plus $1,990 for the service or sales servers.