14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has made an aggressive move against rivals on the Customer Management Relationship market Salesforce.com and Oracle, offering their customers cash incentive to migrate to its own CRM offerings. In fact, the Redmond company is prepared to offer companies as much as $50,000 in cash just to convince them to abandon their existing CRM solution from either Salesforce.com or Oracle.
But fact is that even though Oracle is also mentioned, this is actually a swing at Salesforce.com’s jugular ahead of anything else.
The cash incentives were promised in an open letter to Salesforce.com customers published in the Western regional edition of today’s Wall Street Journal, coinciding with the debut of Dreamforce, Salesforce.com’s annual customer conference.
According to the software giant, only existing Salesforce.com and Oracle customers can take advantage of the “Cloud CRM for Less” which pays $200 for each user migrated to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online between now and June 30, 2011.
Michael Park, corporate vice president of sales, marketing, and operations, Microsoft Business Solutions noted “If you are a Salesforce.com customer attending Dreamforce this week, we encourage you to ask the following:
• In this economy, how can I justify paying two to three times more for an enterprise CRM system than I need to?
• Microsoft provides a financially backed 99.9 percent uptime commitment for every Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online customer; why does Salesforce.com only provide me with “commercially reasonable efforts” to keep my business running?
• Having access to the most up-to-date information is critical to my business; why doesn’t Salesforce.com provide real-time access to data and dashboards, refreshed whenever I need it like Microsoft does?
• Microsoft works great with Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office; why does Salesforce.com want me to start from scratch when it comes to productivity tools for my people?
• Microsoft provides the flexibility for my CRM system to work with other systems whether they run in the cloud or on-premises; why does Salesforce.com lock me into one way of doing things?”
Microsoft is ready to offer $200 per license for at least 15 users migrated, but said that it will not pay for more than a total of 250 seats.
Customers currently running Salesforce.com (Professional, Enterprise, or Ultimate Editions) as well as those with Oracle (Siebel CRM or CRM On Demand) are free to take the Redmond company on its offer, provided that they’re ready to sign a two year licensing agreement for Dynamics CRM Online.
The Redmond company also underlined additional financial advantages for customers as soon as Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 launches internationally in January 2011, with Dynamics CRM Online available for as low as $34 per user per month.