Salesforce.com Rocks CRM Magazine Awards

For the first time in the history of the CRM Magazine awards, Salesforce.com has swept the CRM category, winning the Enterprise Suite CRM, Midmarket Suite CRM and Small-Business Suite CRM awards.

“We are thrilled to be recognized by CRM magazine and to be the first company to sweep all of the Market Awards in the CRM Suite categories,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. “At salesforce.com we are committed to customer success, and it is wonderful to have our efforts and products validated by the top experts in the CRM industry.”

CRM Market Award recipients are determined “through an extensive three-month process and proprietary rating formula that involves industry analysts, financial and corporate information, product and functionality assessments, and scores reflecting customer satisfaction.”

In addition to salesforce.com receiving the CRM Market Leader Awards, two of its customers received CRM Elite Awards for their Salesforce CRM implementations. NBC Universal received a CRM Elite Award for its use of Salesforce CRM; and ShipServ received a CRM Elite Award for its combined use of Salesforce CRM, Marketo and social media.

"To stay competitive in a challenging economy, companies must come up with innovative ways to improve their customer relationship efforts. This is exactly what the recipients of the 2009 CRM Market Awards have done," said David Myron, CRM magazine's editorial director. "Congratulations to this year's award recipients for their achievements over the last year. May their CRM efforts continue to succeed."

Microsoft Dynamics Online Announces Third Update, Discounts For Switching From SalesForce, Oracle

The service update to Microsoft Dynamics Online provides new features at no extra cost to customers, including mobile access, enhanced data import, customizable views and simplified pricing.

Organizations can get started with a 30 day trial or paid subscription to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. Customers are able to access the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online service through Microsoft Outlook, a Web browser or from a wide range of mobile devices — all at no additional charge.

Microsoft has streamlined and reduced its Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online pricing for all customers. All Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online offerings are now available at $44 per user per month, and include offline support, 200 custom entities, 200 workflows and up to 5 GB of storage.

In addition to the 30 day free trial available to all customers, Microsoft is offering six months of free access to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online for current Salesforce.com and Oracle customers. Eligibility requirements and other details of this offer can be found at http://offers.crmchoice.com/moreforless.

“We’ve built our business on Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, and we’ve helped more than 75 companies adopt the service in the past year,” said Steve Bowles, chief executive officer of Pelagic Solutions Inc. “In our experience Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online simply delivered a lot more capabilities and value than other software as a service (SaaS)-based CRM systems, at a lower price.”

The new November 2009 service update will be available to all Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online customers by Nov. 15, 2009. Businesses can get started today by signing up for a no-cost 30-day trial by subscribing at http://crm.dynamics.com

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0

Perhaps Microsoft Dynamics CRM's biggest advantage over it's competitors is integration with Microsoft Office, specifically Excel and Outlook.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 synchronized with Microsoft Outlook 2003.

Using the Microsoft Sales for Outlook client, users can manage all customer information including sales, leads and marketing tools. Since all of this data is shared company wide, all users see one cohesive view of current sales and marketing data.

Coming in 2007 Microsoft Dynamics CRM will also be available as a hosted service to be called "CRM LIVE" which will be part of Microsoft's family of "Live" hosted services.

Salesforce.Com - Say No To Software?

A purely hosted CRM solution, SalesForce.com was founded in 1999 by ex-Oracle executive Marc Benioff and the company has now grown to over $300 million in annual revenue and over 1300 employees.

Under their "No Software" mantra, they pioneered the Software As A Service (SaaS) concept. They have expanded their SaaS approach by allowing third-party developers to build addons under their AppExchange program which now features over 400 free and commercial plugins. The available plugins include analytics, email marketing and industry specific plugins for real estate, education, health care and others.

The SalesForce services are available in four editons: Team, Professional, Enterprise and Unlimited. Each progressive edition includes additional features - see the comparison matrix for details.

With half a million customers and industry awards from InfoWorld, Forrester and Gartner SalesForce.Com is the current hosted CRM market leader.

SugarCRM - Commercial Open Source

SugarCRM offers both enterprise and professional commercial editions of their open source product, "Sugar Open Source". These editions extend the base open source product with additional features plus software support.
SugarCRM believes their combination of open source development with commercial addons and support enable them to provide better value for their customers CRM dollars. Their products have been translated into 40 languages with the help of 4,500 community developers and over 150 business partners. The Sugar Open Source software package has been downloaded over 1,700,000 times.

Their CRM solution may also be paired with the seemingly endless commercial and open source addons available at SugarExchange and SugarForge, respectively. These additional products provide integration with other software such as Asterisk PBX's, LDAP authentication databases, etc.

You may also use their hosted edition, Sugar On Demand. Unlike other hosted solutions, you can transfer from their Sugar On Demand to a self-hosted setup at anytime. This can provide a lot of flexibility to businesses as they grow and their CRM needs expand.

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