Apparently Microsoft is a little more worried about its cloud position than it's letting on. Now it's paying customers $200 per user to switch to its cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) service, which competes directly with Salesforce.com.
In an advertisement in today's Wall Street Journal, Microsoft posted an "open letter" to customers with an existing CRM system from Salesforce.com or Oracle (Siebel). The advertisement particularly encouraged Salesforce customers attending the Dreamforce conference this week to ask why they should pay Salesforce two or three times as much as they'd pay Microsoft for its Dynamics CRM Online service.
There are many shades of grey in services and pricing, and customers would be well advised to check if the services being compared are apples to apples before taking this cost savings claim at face value. Plus, the biggest expense of an enterprise CRM system is installing it and training--and convincing--employees to use it effectively. No IT department relishes going through that hassle more than once.
The letter closed by pointing to the special offer, which runs through July 30, 2011, and amounts to a few free months over the course of a required two-year contract. Microsoft encourages customers to use it to migrate data from their old CRM or to pay up any early termination fees that their current vendor might impose.
