Not everybody is convinced that Microsoft's new
commitment
to openness
is legitimate, but it's good enough for Todd Hooper, CEO of
a startup called
Napera Networks
.
"I think they've bought into it," Hooper told RCPU in a phone chat
recently. "I don't think it's a smokescreen or anything like that. They
started working on this stuff in 2006, and they were anticipating what was to
come."
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Posted by Lee Pender on 03/18/20080 comments
Remember Microsoft's plan to converge its four ERP suites into one mega-product?
It was
still causing
confusion
at last year's Convergence.
Not anymore. Or not really, anyway. Why? "We concluded Project Green,"
said Mogens Elsberg, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics ERP, not leaving
a lot of room for ambiguity.
And there's not much ambiguity anymore about how Dynamics works. Steve Ballmer
mentioned it again this week: The four-suite strategy is alive and well on the
ERP side and will continue to be. (Oh, sure the suites all have pretty much
the same interfaces now, and, as far as we know, they're still on the way to
having the same code base, but the mega-suite idea, at least as a branding and
marketing concept, is dead.)
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Posted by Lee Pender on 03/13/20081 comments
While Dynamics CRM Live, the forthcoming SaaS version of Microsoft's CRM suite,
has sparked a few conversations at Convergence, rarely does anybody breathe
a word about hosted Dynamics ERP.
RCP looked
into hosted ERP in our March issue, and there are a lot of reasons why critical
back-end software and the SaaS model don't always mix. Plus, and probably as
a result, there doesn't seem to be a huge market for it.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 03/13/20083 comments
A surprisingly high -- we think, anyway -- 20 percent of GP customers have
moved to the Dynamics ERP suite from Intuit's small-business accounting package,
QuickBooks. Or, at least, that's what Microsoft found in doing GP customer research,
said Jon Pratt, senior director at Microsoft and GP guru.
Redmond sees an opportunity in companies growing out of QuickBooks, Pratt said.
"We looked very clearly at the size of when they did move. Many of them
moved much later in the cycle than we thought they should have. Many of them
said we didn't start thinking about it until get got to 20" million dollars
in annual revenue, he said, adding that one customer was still on QuickBooks
despite raking in $100 million in annual revenue. "We'd like to move that
line back." Pratt's thinking that $5 million to $10 million sounds better.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 03/13/20081 comments
We -- or, more specifically, former Dynamics honcho Tami Reller --
told
you about this
last year. Within a year, Reller said (that's right now,
if you're keeping score at home), Dynamics partners will have to have a SharePoint
competency in order to sell Microsoft's ERP and CRM suites.
Are we there yet? Not quite...but we're close. SharePoint is big business now
for Microsoft (a billion
dollars a year worth of big), but questions remain -- don't they always?
-- as to whether companies are just buying it or actually using it.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 03/13/20080 comments
The whole press release, including some useful information on the new features
in AX 2009 (the latest update of AX, announced today and obtusely "code-named"
AX 5.0), which should arrive by the end of June, is
here
.
There's also "news" about how Microsoft designed some of its "role-tailored"
Dynamics interfaces by using research conducted with something called the IT
University of Copenhagen -- what, we wonder, is the school's mascot? -- on how
users respond emotionally to software screens.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 03/12/20080 comments
Ask Steve Ballmer, as somebody did -- via e-mail, as there was no "live"
Q&A with Ballmer at Convergence this year -- what Dynamics CRM's main selling
points are in competition with online CRM titan Salesforce.com, and here's what
he'll say: "We really are well-integrated with Outlook, Word and Excel.
Your users will appreciate our interface."
OK, so he said a bunch of other stuff, too -- that Dynamics CRM Live (the hosted
version of the software) is half the price of Salesforce.com, that Microsoft
gives users a choice of whether to implement it with a strictly SaaS model or
whether to install something on-premises, and that Dynamics CRM Live is (or
will be when it comes out, which Ballmer says will be by the end of June) easier
to customize than Salesforce.com.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 03/12/20080 comments
If Disneyworld is the Magic Kingdom, then Orlando is Faketown. Nothing here
is real. It's all plastic...with a theme.
That's not to say that Orlando can't be a pleasant place to hang out. The sun
has just broken through the clouds this afternoon after a day or two of cloudy
gloom, but the highs in the 70s and lows in the 50s have made for a nice break
from chilly Boston. And, after an excursion last night with an unidentified
fellow employee of 1105 Media and another gentleman who's an Orlando local,
your editor discovered that there are establishments in this town that don't
have anything to do with Disney characters, water slides or movie studio theme
parks.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 03/12/20080 comments
Microsoft gets it. One of the main roadblocks -- probably the main roadblock
-- to a successful ERP implementation is usability, or, more specifically, users
simply refusing to navigate the eye-glazing, brain-scrambling screens in front
of them.
Knowing that, Microsoft is hammering the message at Convergence that Dynamics
applications are easy on the eyes, and, by extension, on the brain. In his keynote
today, Microsoft corporate vice president and still new Dynamics honcho Kirill
Tatarinov spent the bulk of his stage time showing screen shots and getting
into the nuts and bolts of how easy Dynamics is to use. His speech was short-ish
on talking about new functionality and very long on waxing about the apps' user-friendliness.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 03/12/20080 comments
We
told
you last week
that Microsoft is talking a lot about document format interoperability
these days and that part of what it's trying to do in order to be -- or at least
seem -- more open is have its document format, Office Open XML, accepted as
a standard by the ISO (and, perhaps not surprisingly, the U.S. delegation to
the ISO
seems
to be on board
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Posted by Lee Pender on 03/11/20082 comments
Microsoft still has more than $40 billion burning a hole in its pocket for
the proposed Yahoo acquisition -- although Ray Ozzie told the
Financial Times
(why doesn't anybody every come to RCPU with news like this? Never mind -- we
know why) that even if Microsoft does swallow Yahoo, Redmond will
take
its time
in digesting its prey.
But even with Yahoo still in play, and with Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. saying
that they won't
fight Redmond for control of the Web pioneer, Microsoft is on the lookout
for other smaller fish to swallow.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 03/11/20080 comments