Microsoft Eases Economic Pressures With Free Product Updates

Microsoft Business Solutions corporate vice president Kirill Tatarinov highlighted how businesses can maximise their enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) investments to thrive in today’s economy at a recent company event held in New Orleans.

Tatarinov outlined the Microsoft vision of the Dynamic Business, a way for organisations to combine the unique value of their people, businesses processes, and connections with their customers and trading partners to increase relevance, responsiveness and impact.

According to a December 2008 report from Forrester Research by analyst R ‘Ray’ Wang, “as enterprises face an increasing frequency and intensity of change, business and IT leaders must address the continued economic and geopolitical uncertainty, the emergence of new business models, changing workforce dynamics, and rapid advances in technology. This requires that application delivery leaders increase focus on reducing ongoing operations and maintenance costs in order to respond to both expected and unexpected change. Successful alignment requires a focus on recession-relevant business drivers such as compliance and efficiency.” (‘Five Steps To Building A Recession-Proof Packaged Applications Strategy’).

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“Our goal is to inspire customers to embrace change, to focus on how to anticipate and plan for change accordingly, and ultimately turn this economic crisis into opportunity,” Tatarinov said. “Successful businesses will be able to endure and prevail in an increasingly complex world.”

Extending its commitment to giving businesses economical access to applications to manage their operations, the company has unveiled a set of technological innovations and pricing discounts that will further drive customer return on investment, including the following:

- Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online March 2009 Service Update. At no additional charge, Microsoft is delivering an industry-leading, financially backed service level agreement of 99.9 percent uptime to all Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online customers; new Internet lead capture capabilities that help increase sales pipeline while reducing costs; cloud integration services that provide multiple options for security-enhanced Web-based authentication with third-party applications; and new quick-start tools that familiarise new customers with the application so they can realise value quickly. Additional information can be found at http://crm.dynamics.com

- Microsoft Dynamics CRM Accelerators. Also at no additional charge, Microsoft is offering eight software extensions that are available for download today. The CRM Accelerators are add-on solutions that can be deployed to extend marketing, sales and service capabilities. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Accelerators are Analytics, Business Productivity, CRM Notifications, Enterprise Search, eService, Event Management, Extended Sales Forecasting and Sales Methodologies, and can be downloaded at http://www.codeplex.com/crmaccelerators

- Unleash Your Potential. An initiative designed to help customers discover further value from their Microsoft Dynamics ERP solution, Unleash Your Potential helps current and prospective customers identify the system capabilities they need to improve their businesses and plan ahead for possible strategic investments. Working in tandem with their certified Microsoft Dynamics partner, customers receive a personalised Business Solutions Roadmap that outlines the ways in which they can maximise their current ERP investments and better achieve their business goals by using functionality that in many cases they already have.