The Power of Choice - be a good host to your employees and customers (2/3) - Why?

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Welcome to the second part of the blog post series about The Power of Choice. In this post I’ll focus on why S+S if the right way forward for a lot of companies. Especially the challenging business situation in most of the world at the moment redefines the goals and terms you have to be aware of. Cost of ownership and financing continued business development are just two of the areas to consider with the IT platform in general and CRM in particular.

Customer opportunities
There are different challenges prompting customers to consider on-demand alternatives. Some companies are motivated by more than one of the following and the list can be extended as well. You as a partner should be ready to face the tasks together with your customer. With Software+Services this becomes an easier and more adjustable CRM strategy – agile to the environment of the business.

  • Low kick-off investment
  • Optimize use of IT resources
  • Rapid deployment
  • Demand for business continuity
  • Flexibility and agility
  • Engage across devices
  • Change Management
  • Need for cost management and cost flexibility

All of these points towards the strengths of software on demand – in the cloud – together with considerations around security and business focuses that will ask for software and data on premise. Companies may have software or data in their business that's a form of differentiation or even a competitive edge maybe that they want to keep more private.

Focus on business process, not device
Microsoft Dynamics S+S is centered around customer’s business processes. Customers have to be able to describe them, to customize them, to implement them in any way they want to, no matter how this gets deployed across desktop, Web, server and mobile.
The company makes The Power of Choice - level 1: Environment on their own terms considering:

  • Risk
  • Cost
  • Differentiation
  • Ambition
  • Time to market
  • IT Resources

Scoring all of these and maybe more dimensions will give you the map of where the process, business department or technology ambition is best supported and fueled.

Partner opportunities
Microsoft partners are the advisors, the experts when it comes to application of technology in businesses and they work closer together with their customers from the early phases of springing new ideas and innovation to implementation both technical and organization wise.

The budget once used for hardware can instead be partly used for other parts of the project, the consultants helps the customers taking full advantage of the cloud and the hosting of business environment. Business applications being activated and empowered in the cloud puts an end to many of the boundaries that you have on premise.

Information sources / some relevant articles

6 Things SaaS Needs To Do In 2009

Hosted/SaaS vs. On-Premise Systems

SaaS still on the rise, despite IT spending slowdown
Samme på dansk: Selskaber hungrer efter SaaS trods finanskrisen

10 Cloud Computing Predictions For 2009

Another good resource

Software-plus-Services Roadmap for ISVs 

 

Stay tuned for part 3: “How?”

 

Enjoy! :-)

Martin Houlberg Jensen
CRM Evangelist
Microsoft Dynamics CRM team