It’s Still Coming! Microsoft’s Hosted CRM Solution

It was predicted in some press reports that, when Bill Gates made his keynote speech at Convergence ’06 in Dallas on Monday morning, he would make specific mention of “Titan,” the code name for Microsoft’s planned hostable, multi-tenancy CRM product. The predictions were wrong; instead the focus of Gates speech was ‘software as a service’ (SaaS). Titan was, however, the topic of many other conversations at Convergence and the Microsoft folks did talk about enhancements to their current (and successful) CRM product, Dynamics CRM 3.0.

The enhancement of Dynamics CRM 3.0 is being called the "Service Provider Edition." This will not be Titan, which is rumored to be a full-on, multi-tenancy CRM solution but the Service Provider Edition should make hosting somewhat easier with its enhancements to the Dynamics CRM 3.0 release. So the trend continues, little has been said or is being said publicly about Titan since last year when Brad Wilson, Microsoft’s CRM General Manager let it ‘slip’ that they were working on a hostable CRM solution with that code name and then on Saturday (3/25/06), at a pre-Convergence event, a company spokesman confirmed plans for a release of a hostable CRM product by June of 2007.

In December of 2005, Microsoft released Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 which, while it was a major step forward over Microsoft’s existing products, did not support multi-tenancy. Multi-tenancy, the capability of allowing a shared server to host several accounts, is seen as an absolute must if Microsoft is to mount a successful assault on Salesforce.com — an objective that has reportedly been a hot topic among Microsoft’s executives.

As Titan nears its release date there are other questions that need to be answered; chief among those is the question of who’s hosting the new product? Current speculation indicated that Microsoft, at a customer’s request, will host CRM. The question raised by that speculation is: what then happens to the third parties, like ePartners and Navisite, that Microsoft recruited to host its CRM 3.0 product? An even more complex question may involve Microsoft’s ongoing relationship with other existing Microsoft partners who are offering their own hosted CRM solutions built on Microsoft’s technology. Questions or not, it will be no surprise when Microsoft does whatever it needs to do to assure the success of the Titan product; if that means hosting Titan at the request of a major account, so be it.

When all is said and done, these may be moot points anyway; Microsoft’s partners in CRM ventures have reportedly been assured that a situation that involved a Microsoft hosted solution would be "revenue neutral" to them. So what’s the reaction of Salesforce.com, Microsoft’s chief competitor in the hosted CRM arena? When CRN.com sent an e-mail to Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s CEO, asking for a reaction to Titan he e-mailed back: "They are unveiling hosted CRM again? Didn’t they already do that twice?" Maybe Mr. Benioff has rejected the old adage: ". . . third time’s a charm!"