It's the eve of Dreamforce, Salesforce.com's global customer conference in San Francisco, and a couple of much larger rivals appear to be allowing the tail to wag the dog.
Microsoft on Monday published an open letter from Michael Park Corporate Vice President, Sales, Marketing and Operations, Microsoft Business Solutions which announced the “Cloud CRM for Less” offer for Salesforce.com and Oracle customers. Essentially this is offering customers of those vendors a $200 rebate if they switch over to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online by the end of June next year.
Park directly targets Dreamforce attendees in his letter: “If you are a Salesforce.com customer attending Dreamforce this week, we encourage you to ask the following:
- In this economy, how can I justify paying two to three times more for an enterprise CRM system than I need to?
- Microsoft provides a financially backed 99.9 percent uptime commitment for every Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online customer; why does Salesforce.com only provide me with “commercially reasonable efforts” to keep my business running?
- Having access to the most up-to-date information is critical to my business; why doesn’t Salesforce.com provide real-time access to data and dashboards, refreshed whenever I need it like Microsoft does?
- Microsoft works great with Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office; why does Salesforce.com want me to start from scratch when it comes to productivity tools for my people?
- Microsoft provides the flexibility for my CRM system to work with other systems whether they run in the cloud or on-premises; why does Salesforce.com lock me into one way of doing things?”
- Park cites Data Reduction Systems as a customer he says switched from Salesforce.com and has since saved more than 50% in user costs and reached 100% user adoption as well as seeing a 75% decrease in annual subscription costs and a 20% increase in user adoption within a month of making the switch."
Meanwhile vistors to Dreamforce are greeted by an advertising banner from Oracle down one side of the Moscone conference centre and boasting of being “The number one CRM”.
Such competitive marketing has been common throughout the software industry for decades, but the fact that giant enterprise software firms such as Oracle and Microsoft are engaging with Salesforce.com is indicative of the importance of dominating the Cloud Computing applications space.
