Astute readers will know I was at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference (WWPC) last week. Our marketing team announced the pricing for CRM Live - which generated a barrage of press. I enjoyed the speculation about our final feature set for Titan. Needless to say the marketing people will be announcing what's in/out of Titan in due course. I have to say: I'm enjoying our marketing team's approach here. It feels less like Microsoft (ie. vomit out all information at the wrong time) and more like Apple (ie. say things at the right time).

I really like the evolutionary approach to our SaaS strategy. Some vendors have the 'heads in the sand' and refuse to talk services seriously (with no offering or a token offering). Other vendors only offer SaaS and trash talk those who aren't pure services players. There is no question that our industry is moving towards services and Microsoft's CRM has a strategy which is sensitive towards these industry changes. As we announced: we are using our Titan Project to create a Microsoft Hosted version, a Partner Hosted version and an On-Premise version. I use the term 'version' loosely as the final number of SKUs is up to marketing. I believe we are entering an time in the industry when customers will start moving away from self hosting 'non-unique' business functions. Anything which can be achieved by configuring on the shelf apps (like Microsoft CRM) will eventually move to hosted services (if I knew exactly when 'eventually' was I'd be a rich man). Our strategy understands that customers and partners will find themselves in varying degrees along the on-premise to hosted spectrum. Some will want everything 'in the cloud' and others will want everyone their own datacenters. Some might want to prototype in the cloud and move to on-premise etc etc. I believe vendors need to interpret these changing times appropriately for their business.

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