Important Industry Announcements, and What We Think of Them

MICROSOFT announced Tableau for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, a product that generates visual displays and reports using a drag and drop interface. The tool creates ad hoc pipeline analyses, sales trends, win/loss reports, standard business performance summaries, and dashboards. There are no “canned” templates or charting wizards in the product, which is supposed to be “intuitive.”
Our Take: We think it’s weird that Microsoft, which constantly touts the use of “wizards” in all of its software, would issue a press release touting that a product that doesn’t use wizards is “intuitive.” Are wizards good or bad? Who knows?

OnContact announced an OEM relationship with the manufacturing systems vendor WorkWise, which will offer OnContact’s CRM solutions to its existing and prospective client base, consisting of some 500 companies worldwide. WorkWise claims to have made an “extensive search of the CRM marketplace to find a technologically advanced CRM system that was built from the ground up specifically for the Microsoft .NET environment.”
Our Take: There are very few CRM systems that tie back to manufacturing, even though the ability to communicate what’s being made versus what’s being sold could really help a company remain profitable. Kudos to OnContact for this one.

salesforce.com announced the Apex on-demand platform and programming language for building business applications such as data models and objects to manage data, a workflow engine for managing collaboration of data between users, a user interface model to handle forms and other interactions, and an API for programmatic access, mashups, and integration with other applications and data.
Our Take: salesforce.com continues to position itself as an integration platform, which puts the company in direct competition with Microsoft. On the one hand, that’s dangerous; Microsoft seldom loses in markets it considers strategic. On the other hand, salesforce.com realizes what some other CRM vendors are just beginning to figure out: that Microsoft, not Oracle, is the company to beat in the CRM market.

NETSUITE unveiled a B2B ecommerce platform that includes quantity pricing, customer price levels, minimum order amounts, invoicing with customer terms and credit limits, re-ordering, and multiple Webstore capabilities that allow the same company to create different sites for their B2B and B2C customers. This is intended to allow companies to run their B2B ecommerce operations without having to develop custom applications or tie together different ecommerce point solutions.
Our Take: By positioning itself outside the traditional “help the salesforce” area of CRM, Netsuite is simply dealing with reality – which is that eventually the majority of B2B activity will take place across the Web. We wouldn’t be entirely surprised to see Netsuite start taking some customers away from the big traditional software houses, if they keep on extending the product so vigorously.

CDC announced that it has signed a distributor agreement with Excel Technology International Holdings Ltd. of Hong Kong, to expand sales of CDC Software’s Pivotal CRM for Financial Services, a customer relationship management solution tailored for the financial services industries, in Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia where Excel Technology has strong presence.
Our Take: This is a natural move for CDC, which is already well deployed in Asia. It’s also a good move for Pivotal, because the U.S. CRM market remains crowded, while CRM is just beginning to catch on in Asia.