CRM BLOG SAFARI
Flying Colors

The certification is partly a way for Microsoft to quantify its relationships with its business partners -- "Microsoft determines who is a Gold partner based on how many people have been certified," he told CRM Buyer -- and partly a credential to attract clients.

The latter is particularly important, Espinoza said, as 4.0 is proving to be Microsoft's most popular customer relationship management app yet. "Microsoft made so many leaps forward with this application. We are definitely seeing demand continue to build for it."

For other Microsoft Business Partners interested in passing the test, Espinoza offers the following tips:

• "There is no drag-and-drop functionality in CRM 4.0. That would be a nice feature to add to the future CRM 5.0, though!
• "Each single Marketing List can only contain one type of record/entity. So if you're planning a Marketing Campaign that will include Accounts, Contacts and Leads, you will need to add at least three separate Marketing Lists to the Marketing Campaign.
• "Relationship Roles in CRM 4.0 are very useful for defining relationships that are not so cut-and-dried. You'll probably see Relationship Roles come up a few times in the exam.
• "Ask yourself what types of CRM records are synchronized with the Outlook Client, and how to create new records from there. Also figure out what records are related and available to each entity. An example: you wouldn't go to an Opportunity record to find related Cases.
• "Find out how the Service Scheduler shows or does not show conflicts in the Service Calendar."

Microsoft of SaaS?

If Microsoft is popular, it is in large part due to its incumbency and death-grip hold on the desktop. Of course, other companies are seeking to pry away those fingers -- Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) to name just two. As for the latter, Salesforce.com has done a great job evangelizing Software as a Service, writes Reverend Ted. Now, the once-scrappy-start-up has become the SaaS powerhouse to beat.

"Now firmly established as the in-the-cloud CRM platform -- and supported by an increasingly sophisticated set of web APIs -- is it possible that Salesforce.com has achieved the market power to stifle aspiring SaaS startups from attaining similar success in other markets beside CRM? That is, could they become (or are they already becoming) the Microsoft of SaaS?" he asks.

Listening to CEO Marc Benioff talk at Dreamforce, Ted wrote, "it occurred to me that any company wanting to win big in a potential SaaS market space would now be required to outmaneuver the emerging Force.com (as well as the entrepreneurs using force.com as a platform). Whether by leveraging it or by out-innovating it, aspiring SaaS entrepreneurs must now consider how Force.com factors into their business plans."

Why Cloud Computing Is Important

Salesforce.com's strategy du jour is its focus on cloud computing, shared with a handful of other forward-looking companies. Alistair Croll explains why cloud computing is not the latest IT fad, but in fact represents an important change for the industry:

Reason No. 5 cloud computing is here to stay: "Clouds let us experiment. By removing the cost of staging an environment, a cloud lets a company try new things faster. This is also true of virtualization in general, but by billing on demand the cloud means anyone can experiment."

Last week, Structure 08 was held. Speakers included luminaries from the tech industry. Following are some excerpts of their comments for those who don't have time to wade through the transcripts.

Werner Vogels, Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) CTO:

"Amazon was, 'til 2001, traditional Web-server-based. Every year, the hassle was how do we scale. We would get through the holiday season, and in January the engineers would sit around and say, how are we going to get through next year? Then Target came to Amazon, and at first we said no way, then we took the opportunity to work with Target to see how we could change Amazon from a single app to a whole platform."

Greg Papadopoulos, Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: JAVA) CTO:

"The reason why I think Software as a Service and cloud computing smokes the other one is not so much the economics but because of innovation. The service model out innovates 'just bits' hands down. We're struggling now to find what is the platform to scale."

Parker Harris, Salesforce.com Founder and EVP:

"Early on, we thought of the tech as software and infrastructure . We thought you can innovate on one or the other, and we had two groups. To truly innovate, you have to think of them as one unit."

Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite:

"The cloud does not solve the problem of application integration. Things won't all magically work together. The Web is very good for loosely coupled things, and the business world needs very tightly coupled applications."