Salesforce.com have provided a release preview and full notes for the Summer 09 release.  Some interesting points to note. Our views below, please feel free to comment and discuss if we’ve missed anything:

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It’s that time again.  saleforce.com have added the ‘Coming in Summer 09′ tag and we’re looking through for the features we want and wondering where the ones we really need have gone to - multiple contacts on a single event, need we say more.

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salesforce.com made a free version of their Mobile application available this week to Professional and Enterprise license users that haven’t got full Mobile licenses.  It’s simple to configure on the salesforce.com side but may need the usual Blackberry device installation hoops to be jumped through.  It’s also available on iPhone and Windows Mobile.  Find out more at http://www.salesforce.com/mobile/lite/

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salesforce.com is about to undergo the third release of the year (or the first release of next year if you go by the branding) - Winter ‘09.  One of the key points of difference for salesforce.com in our experience is the value it adds "for free" with it’s regular release schedule.  This is a much easier upgrade process than your traditional software where business users have to fight for, queue and pay for the IT department to apply upgrades.

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While the SaaS CRM market in Financial Services has been dominated by Salesforce.com for the past few years, recent entrant has to be considered a threat to this dominance.  While Netsuite and RightNow have been beaten off, the release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM online offering – crm.dynamics.com – creates a new alternative that must have the pepped up the Benioff team.

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Microsoft CRM has been an on-site offering for a while and VARs have provided hosted versions as ‘competitors’ to the salesforce.com offering.  However, in Financial Services we’ve seen little headway made by the On-Site offering and the leverage provided by the SaaS community around salesforce.com and it’s new Cloud Computing offering, force.com has increasingly steamrollered the hosted approach – not just for Microsoft but for all ASP providers.

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In general, when carrying out vendor selection or market research projects, our experience is that firms select Microsoft when budget is tight or when the “We’re a Microsoft house” badge carries sufficient weight that IT overrule any other factors.

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However, the release of an SaaS offering, albeit from the same software family, has to be considered separately from the legacy offering.  It’s now in the land of the application alongside salesforce.com, Google docs, eBay, Facebook and the rest.  It will be interesting to see how it fares.  On first glance, our analysis draws the following initial conclusions on the Microsoft CRM Online solution.

+ves

• SasS offering is now available
• Weight of Microsoft marketing and budget behind it – business users are bound to see some advertising if Microsoft throw their dollars behind it
• 99.9% of companies have a relationship with Microsoft – Linux desktop or OpenOffice are yet to make that big a dent
• While it’s not IBM, most IT departments are comfortable with buying Microsoft

-ves

• Change the name – it’s too long and doesn’t make it clear what it does.  It tells us what it is, but to the business user it falls behind salesforce.com in terms of who uses it and how.
• VAR-led distribution > the ability to execute depends upon the quality of the VAR not Microsoft, and there are a lot of VARs with little or no CRM experience in the network
• Little penetration of the Investment Management market
• Development resources required for onsite application
• SaaS is very new
• Microsoft limited track record of providing Enterprise-level applications