5 Reasons to Consider Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online

2011 brought with it the expansion of Microsoft’s latest iteration of Dynamics customer relationship management solution into the Cloud.

In fact, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online went live ahead of the on-premise version of the offering, Dynamics CRM 2011, in January, and is available to customers in some 40 countries worldwide.

I recently had the chance to chat with a few Microsoft representatives including Matej Potokar, Central and Eastern Europe, Microsoft Business Solutions Senior Director, and got to thinking about a few reasons why companies around the world should at least consider Dynamics CRM Online, if not even embrace it.

1. Scalability – The software giant enables customers to get as many or as little licenses, in accordance to their needs.

Small businesses can get Dynamics CRM Online for just a few PCs, while corporations can leverage hundreds of thousands of accounts.

More importantly, customers can seamlessly scale not only up, but also down. This detail certainly beats being stuck with licenses purchased for on-premise deployments that are no longer needed.

2. Availability - Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online comes with a Service Level Agreement (SLA), and customers familiar with other of the Redmond company’s Cloud properties might already be familiar with the terms.

The software giant promises 99.9% uptime, and will offer service credit of 25% for uptime between 99% and 99.9%.

Downtime larger than 1% will earn customers 50% service credit, while for downtime of 5% or more the service credit is 100%.

3. Security - The promise from Microsoft is that not only the customer’s data is safe on the servers in the company’s databases with such solutions as encryption, but that special security measures are taken to protect the infrastructure itself.

The software giant offers insight into its Cloud security practices in this document “Information Security Management System for Microsoft Cloud Infrastructure.”

The company’s security strategy covers a number of aspects from information security to asset management, but also to human resources security, physical and environmental security, communications and operations management, access control, business continuity, and compliance.

Microsoft is rather confident that the customer’s data is nowhere as safe as on its servers.

4. No infrastructure – This is a key advantage, at least in my view. Fact is that IT is slowly migrating to a service based model.

For some customers, the costs associated with building the infrastructure, managing and maintaining it are often prohibitive, even if they could afford the licenses for the software without any problems.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is available at $34 per user per month provided that the agreement is inked with the company by June 30, 2011.

5. Free trial – There’s no excuse to not even try it, since Microsoft is offering a free trial of Dynamics CRM Online.

Customers get the full feature set of Dynamics CRM 2011 to test for an entire month, more than enough time to see whether Dynamics CRM Online is what they need or not.

Dynamics CRM Server 2011 RTM is available for download here.