MS Executive Indicates CRM Showing Stronger Growth Than ERP

Microsoft credits strong growth in CRM for putting MS Business Solutions over the $1 billion mark in fiscal 2007. As for ERP, well, the silence following all the kudos for CRM may well have spoken volumes. According to Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business Division, speaking at a recent session with securities analysts, the accomplishment was “fueled by greater than 50 per cent growth with Dynamics CRM. In fact, we sold more than 85,000 seats of Dynamics CRM in the last quarter.” He congratulated his division by repeating the number: “85,000. That’s about the same as SalesForce.com.” The boost in CRM sales means, “We have 11,000 customers and 475,000 people using on-premise Dynamics CRM. This fall, we’re launching Dynamics Live CRM, a new software as a service offering, it runs in Microsoft data centers, can also be hosted by our partners. It’s offered in a subscription form.” Dynamics CRM “can handle multiple business models simultaneously…to give customers choice in terms of deployment.” And it can be hosted by partners. Raikes didn’t say as much about ERP, which suggests it’s not showing as much promise as CRM. He simply noted, “We’re bringing updated versions of our ERP products, Dynamics AX and NAV to market.” Looking ahead, he said “We’re going to continue to see strong growth in our Microsoft Business Solutins business, both ERP and CRM.” For the full text of his presentation, see: http://www.microsoft.com/msft/speech/FY07/RaikesFAM2007.mspx