Salesforce vs Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Hooray! Marc Benioff bought another cool (and probably very expensive) domain Site.com. Actually, that's all news, because the service for simple site-building launched on this domain - is not new. It's all the same Siteforce tool, previously available in Salesforce's marketing cloud. And, in our opinion, this service is not worth of such domain. We still believe that there is a great demand for simple site-building service. But what Salesforce offers - is nonsense. Of course, the visual editor in Site.com - is very powerful. It's so CSS-oriented and allows to create pages from templates, forms, dynamic pages, pull content from a database, use JavaScript and even publish pages to Facebook. But it's not simple. Rather, it's more suitable for web designer, than for marketer. And why web designer needs this toy, if he can faster create a better site in a code editor?

Salesforce - is if not the trend-setter in the Enterprise, than it's certainly the indicator of most important trends in this sphere. The company had grown on the wave of CRM and SaaS, then came to the front edge of cloud platforms, mobile applications and social software. And now Salesforce wants to occupy two more hot areas - Talent Management and Gamification. The common goal of these technologies - is staff motivation and development. Crazy demand for talent management system has been proven by SuccessFactors, which has set several records in SaaS-implementation and recently was acquired by SAP. And we have already mentioned about Gamification potential. So, today Salesoforce has bought one of the most promising startups in these areas - Rypple (known as Zynga for Enterprise).

Salesforce always used to call its products - the Clouds. Until now, Salesforce had 3 product-clouds: Sales Cloud (CRM system), Service Cloud (customer support system) and the Collaboration Cloud (or Chatter). Today the company is launching the new Social Marketing Cloud. It's a combination of two products: the social media monitor Radian6 and cloud CMS for creating websites Siteforce. We have already told a lot about Radian6. Radian6 was acquired by Saleforce earlier this year and it's customer list includes Dell, GE, Kodak, UPS, etc. Radian6 can monitor social networks for mentioning of your brand, company, products, competitors, analyze public opinion, engage in to social conversations. Integration with Salesforce CRM now allows to use Radian6 to create social profiles in CRM and track the history of social communications, send messages to social networks directly from the CRM interface (watch video).

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff can use any news or events for his marketing purposes. In his latest speeches, Mark is  talking about the well-known social movement Occupy Wall Street. As you know, this demonstration was organized mainly via the social networks, and in particular thank to the Twitter hashtag #OccupyWallStreet. "Look, what social networks can do" - says Benioff - "they can overthrow governments. And they also can easily destroy your business. Ignoring social networks - is ignoring your customers." Benioff has launched his own Twitter hashtag #OccupyTheEnterprise and scares enterprises with it. And from the other hand, he cites the example of using social networks by the Salesforce client  - KLM airlines.

Salesforce seriously decided to become the leading provider of customer support solutions. Its own solution Salesforce Service Cloud is already almost flying to space, but its price is also too cosmic for small business. Therefore, in order to land SMBs, the company decided to buy (for $80 million) the one of the two most popular SaaS Helpdesk services - Assistly (the second - is Zendesk). Assistly fits perfectly into the Salesforce's new Social Enterprise concept. This service allows you to communicate with customers via Twitter, Facebook, client forum, live-chat as well as via traditional channels (email and phone). At the same time support people work in one simple interface. Also, Assistly is known for its original pricing: it's free for one helpdesk agent, and the additional agents can use the service on per-hour based model ($1/hour). So if no requests are coming to support - your company pays nothing for the helpdesk.

We continue to monitor the gamification of business applications. And the first gamified CRM is ... Nitro for Salesforce. This system was presented at the recent Dreamforce 2011 conference and will launch later this month. It's interesting that Nitro for Salesforce is created not by some guys from garage, but by the gamification professionals at Bunchball. For several years, this company is developing games for various projects. Its clients include Warner Brothers, NBC, HP, Comcast, Playboy. However, so far the company developed game mechanics only for consumer projects, and now decided to try its technologies in business application. As it's clear from the title, Nitro for Salesforce - is an add-on for Salesforce CRM.

On Friday nobody wants to read long news. Good video is much better. This is the video that was shown at the opening of the Dreamforce 2011 conference - probably the most glamorous event in the IT-industry. This video marks the focus change of Marc Benioff and his Salesforce. Last eight years the Dreamforce conference started and ended with the word Cloud. Now it changed. Moreover, one of the main news of this year conference was the opportunity for Salesforce customers to store part of their data on a local server, not in the Cloud. And the new main focus for Salesforce is Social Enterprise. Benioff is comparing modern companies with the Arab countries falling under revolutions: "Either CEOs will make their companies social, or customers and employees will depose them like Muammar Gaddafi". So what should a company do to become social?

Microsoft's own enterprise Twitter clone called OfficeTalk is rumored to appear soon. But rumors are rumors, and meanwhile MS Dynamics CRM users look with envy at Salesforce users who have the free Chatter. However, now they also get an option. Sonoma Partners (Microsoft's implementation partner) today announced the availability of the free (Community) version of Vibe - the social network for MS Dynamics CRM. Vibe, like most similar solutions is based on microblogs that are created either by users or automatically by the system when some event occurs (for example, new order is entered). Users can subscribe to activity feeds of their colleagues, work-groups, particular topic and system alerts in order to keep abreast of everything that is happening and collaborate on tasks.

Probably it's the first time in Microsoft's history, when SaaS version of a product appears before the in-house version. Yesterday the company launched the SaaS version of its CRM system Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online 2011. The in-house version will appear only on February 28 (it turned out that it needs more testing). But most importantly, SaaS version, which untill now was available only in the U.S. and Canada, has been translated into 40 languages and is now available in 40 countries. : Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Romania, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Trinidad and Tobago, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Microsoft marketing people couldn't get enough of their cool marketing idea. On the street near the conference center, where the Salesforce's Dreamforce conference takes place, they send their people on segways with banners (on picture). The banner shows a dissapointed man, who has moved from Saleforce to MS Dynamics CRM Online. Under his photo there is a strapline: "I didn't get forced". But Microsoft marketers did not know whom they are dealing with... In the beginning of the second coference day Mark Benioff, Salesforce CEO, entered the stage...

This week, Microsoft filed a lawsuit against Salesforce, blaming the SaaS company in violating 9 patents. These patents are not about CRM functionality (it would be strange, because Salesforce CRM appeared earlier than Microsoft CRM was developed), but about basic software technologies. For example, here is the technology of displaying web-page with embedded menu: "A request for a web page is received from a web browser In response to the request, a web page and an applet associated with the web page are packaged for transmission to the web browser. The web page and the applet are then transmitted to and downloaded by the web browser. When the web page is displayed and the applet is executed by the web browser, the applet creates and manages an embedded menu in the displayed web page under control of the applet . This embedded menu provides a user of the web browser with a plurality of links through one action in the displayed web page." Perhaps having this patent, Microsoft could close any SaaS vendor, but they have chosen Salesforce, their main competitor on CRM market.