A Bright Spot for Microsoft: Dynamics CRM on a Sharp Growth Curve

Microsoft Dynamics CRM is one of the company’s pleasant surprises during this recessionary period.

“We’re seeing a lot of growth,” in the range of 20-30% thus far in 2009, versus the same period last year, reports Bill Patterson, director, worldwide product management, for Dynamics CRM, who was interviewed late last week. Indeed, that kind of growth makes Dynamics CRM one of Microsoft’s three product areas that have grown at a faster-than 20% pace, he says.

Equally encouraging, according to Patterson, is that growth hasn’t been limited to any particular region or industry. “It’s growing in every one of our regions,” he says. Patterson attributes the success of Dynamics CRM to “having the right set of price-to-value considerations,” and to stacking up well against competitors, in particular, Salesforce.com. “Our philosophy is that we can run it in our cloud, you can run it in your cloud, or you can take it and run it in someone else’s cloud.”

He also notes that Dynamics CRM is being deployed about 85% of the time to integrate with a major ERP system, such as from Oracle or SAP, as well as Dynamics ERP products. Dynamics CRM “has been built with integration in mind.”

He credits the wide adoption of Dynamics CRM in part to the competitive advantage provided by the xRM platform, which has been used by many partners and ISVs to develop specialized applications. Dynamics CRM has also benefited from being available in 40 languages, and having nine accelerators, which are added without charge to customers.

And success breeds success. “The rest of (Microsoft) is rallying behind us,” he says. “We are getting visibility in front of other parts of the company.”

Looking ahead, he says that ...