Ballmer goes Live

As though to prove how serious his company is about its SaaS development, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer himself presented a live demo of the upcoming Microsoft Dynamics Live CRM service in his keynote address yesterday at Convergence 2007, Microsoft Corp.’s biannual event for Microsoft Dynamics customers.

The Microsoft Dynamics Live CRM service will be powered by the upcoming release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, currently known as Titan, which employs the same multi-tenant code base in delivering on-premise and SaaS deployments, and allows customers to choose the right deployment model for their needs at any time.

Ballmer enumerated ways in which the Live CRM service will “help deliver new levels of companywide productivity to users as well as the critical role of partners in the Live era that will fulfill Microsoft’s vision to help customers connect business vision with software, people with processes, and companies with communities.”

As part of the Titan rollout, Microsoft will offer an online solution catalog that allows partners to list their products and capabilities that relate to Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The online catalog will include partners from the on-premise, partner-hosted and live models of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Titan is currently planned to be available via the Live CRM service beginning in the third quarter of 2007, with on-premise and partner-hosted versions becoming available in the fourth quarter of 2007. Titan will be available in a whopping 24 languages.