Today I had a chance to meet up with Mark Corley in Vienna to talk about the Austrian CRM market with special emphasis on hosting. Mr. Corley is responsible for building Microsoft’s global Software + Service business for the Dynamics CRM product line – the delivery of sales force automation, customer service and marketing automation solutions directly over the Internet via hosting service providers. He is also responsible for managing all channel strategy activities and helping grow the CRM practices of its various business partners, including Value Added Resellers, System Integrators, Outsourcers, Independent Software Vendors (ISV) and Hosters.
Among other things we also talked about
CRM Live (the Microsoft-hosted sort of „out-of-the-box“ model) and I expressed my concerns, having in mind what every piece of literature about CRM will teach you first: „CRM is not a Software“. Anyway, CRM Live will not hit Europe in the next couple of months, so there is still some time to see what happens and how the US-market reacts. I asked Mark about integration of OWA (Outlook Web Access) which would be a huge step towards ASP-operation working without any software that has to be installed on the client. Hmmm… That seemed to have been a very good question. In my eye the complexity of such an integration would not be that high, let’s see what comes out of that. Having talked about expanding marketshare it looks like that our business model matches Microsoft’s long-term strategy. I can’t tell you more, sorry ;-)
