Q&A: Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft’s Business Division, outlines how the company’s new services offerings and investments help overcome the challenges of information overload, as well as connecting and collaborating across today’s traditional online boundaries.Press Pass: Microsoft announced plans 14 months ago to offer an on-demand version of Dynamics CRM. How are things going today?Raikes: Our CRM business is doing very well. In fact, during the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2007, we sold more than 85,000 seats of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Today, more than 11,000 customers -- including 475,000 users -- enjoy the benefits of Microsoft Dynamics CRM with either on-premise or partner-hosted deployments. These customers range from the Phoenix Suns basketball team to Cypress Care, a healthcare company that, incidentally, switched from Salesforce.com.
Next, we’ll offer a new CRM software-as-a-service offering, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live, powered by the upcoming new release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The new release – code-named “Titan” – offers a single, multi-tenant code base for on-premise and on-demand deployments. Customers will be able to tailor and adapt their deployment to their needs at any point in time. We think this level of choice – along with the very competitive pricing announced in July – will give us a big advantage in the marketplace over our competitors. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live is already in the hands of more than 100 customer and partner organizations as part of the early access program that I mentioned earlier. This program launched earlier this month. Many more will be added between now and the end of the year. The on-demand service will initially be offered in North America. We will announce plans for international expansion of the service will at a later date.
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