It's been a long (long) time coming, but finally the rest of the world gets to catch up with the US and sign up for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online! Well, large parts of the rest of the world do.
There are still some regions that will have to wait, but it's a massive improvement on the current situation where the essentially the only people who can run Microsoft's Cloud CRM offering are those with a North American zip-code!
At its Convergence conference this week, Microsoft confirmed its road map for international availability. The next release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online will ne made available in 32 markets in the second half of 2010. As well as the UK, the Cloud offering will now be open to subscribers in Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Singapore, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.
“By the end of this year Dynamics CRM Online will be available in 32 markets,” declared Stephen Elop, Microsoft Business Division President. “This will be the fifth release of CRM Online in the past two years, and this release further improves Dynamics CRM connectivity between online and on-premises and between the CRM world and all of our other application environments and portals; so a major point of connection.”
Elop said CRM was at the heart of the Microsoft applications strategy. “At the Worldwide Partner Conference, just last year, we announced that Dynamics CRM growth was 40% despite a challenging economy. Dynamics CRM continues to grow at double digit rates as we go through this fiscal year as well,” he said. “Today there are more than 22,000 Dynamics CRM customers around the world, and over 1.1 million users using this every day somewhere on the globe.”
Central to the future vision of Dynamic CRM is Cloud Computing. “There is one change that is fundamentally redefining our industry and how we will get our jobs done, and that is the advent of Cloud Computing,” affirmed Elop. “[We] have been through this type of generational change in the past: the advent of the graphical user interface, for example, a couple of decades ago; the browser-based Internet, and how that revolutionised computing in the mid-to-late '90s. Cloud computing is just as big. This isn't an obscure trend, it's fundamentally redefining how we expect to get things done.
“The good news is this is not new for Microsoft. We have almost 15 years of experience dealing with very large Cloud Computing services. Indeed, our cloud infrastructure today supports more than 1 billion individuals, and 20 million businesses across all of the properties and all of the things that we do, including things like Windows Live and Hotmail, Xbox, our commercial online services, and a variety of others.”
And there's more to come, he pledged. “Be aware that our intention is to fully embrace the Cloud in a way that fits the needs of all of our customers, that helps take you from here to there, that allows you to take advantage of those new opportunities” he said. “We will spend this year alone $9.5 billion investing in research and development. About 70% of our engineers in our R&D teams today are focused on cloud computing related activities, and within the next two years that will grow to 90%. As we like to say, we are all in, we're all in to Cloud Computing.”
A wider transition
It's all part of a wider transformation that is seeing various new forms of technology converge. “We are at the centre of a remarkable transition in and around just about everything we do related to technology,” said Elop. “Think about all of the changes that have taken place in the last two years. For example, there have been some significant changes in demographics, and the demographic profiles of companies around the world.
“Some of it is because of the arrival of the millennial generation as they come into our workplace and redefine how we get things done.I have five children. The eldest is my 18-year old son, who is just writing his final exam. At the end of his first year of engineering in Hamilton, Ontario. The way he communicates is a bit different than some of us. It's some sort of strange combination of Facebook, a bit of Twitter thrown in, some Skype, and certainly text messaging by the thousands a month. Only once or twice do I get an e-mail from him a month.”
What happens, asked Elop, when that twenty-something enters the workforce? “When he does, he is going to have to communicate effectively with each and every one of you somehow in your business, depending on where he lands, and you will have to communicate with him,” he noted. “Think about that challenge crossing multiple generations, communicating with people quite frankly who may still be most comfortable with the phone or voicemail or whatever.”
There's an unstoppable wave of new communications mechanism on its way, concluded Elop. “Technologies like Facebook and Twitter and all sorts of consumer hardware, they're finding their way into the workplace,” he said. “Our employees, our customers, they are more informed, they have smarter opinions, they are more deliberate in what they expect in the workplace. Yet they have it at home, they want to see it in the office. Why is it harder to get something done in the workplace than at home, why is that?”
This is having an impact on the ICT selection and procurement decisions that are being made. “Just a few weeks ago, I was in Australia, meeting with the CIO of a very large government ministry in the Australian government,” recalled Elop. “He was having a bit of a hard day. He came in and sat down in the meeting, and said that his boss, the minister of this particular department, was hacking on him. The reason was because this minister's mobile device wasn't working well with the e-mail system within their environment. Ten years ago, that wouldn't have been the conversation, and yet the expectation of that minister was that things would work well and would work as they would expect them to, even in their personal lives.”
Elop concluded: “Dynamics is the pinnacle, the absolute cap of all of the value that Microsoft delivers. It takes advantage of just about everything that we do, bringing it all together from business applications through mobile technologies. My job, and the job of every Microsoft representative is to help take advantage of the immense wave of innovation that Microsoft is delivering today, tomorrow, and together. Our job is to help [people] through this incredible time of change.”
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