Conquering the Middle KingdomMicrosoft's emerging Business Solutions division hopes to change forever how small- to medium-sized businesses buy strategic applicationsContinued from Page 1 MBS and CRMMicrosoft CRM won't have Siebel looking for a new niche, but it will provide SMBs with a CRM solution that offers more functionality than popular contact managers such as ACT. However, it offers much less functionality than the complex and expensive enterprise-level CRM systems that some midsized businesses have discovered can't deliver the expected return on investment. In fact, Microsoft CRM currently focuses only on sales force automation and customer service management — just two aspects of CRM (albeit critical ones). One claim to fame is that it's the first Microsoft application built from the ground up with .Net technology. But more practical benefits include its tight integration with Microsoft Outlook and its relatively low cost and ease of implementation. Although both Great Plains and Navision used to integrate with a so-called midmarket version of Siebel CRM, both initiatives were unsuccessful in the marketplace and subsequently withdrawn. Thus, it makes sense to expect that all current and future MBS ERM offerings will benefit from closer integration with Microsoft CRM going forward. Business AnalyticsMost analytics initiatives within Microsoft — the Data Warehouse Initiative, Analysis Services, Notification Services, and even Microsoft's analytic "orphan Annie," the desktop OLAP product Data Analyzer — have thus far originated in the SQL Server group. Otherwise, desktop analytics have focused on Microsoft Excel with its Pivot Tables and drilldown-enabling Outliner functions. Today, just to get a simple listing report from a Microsoft tool or application, you'll need to rely on a third-party product such as Crystal Decisions' Crystal Reports (although this may change when SQL Server's new Reporting Services are released later in 2003). If you want to slice and dice multidimensional cube data delivered by SQL Server Analysis Services, you'll probably use another third-party product from a vendor such as ProClarity Corp. or Targit. And if you want business performance management (BPM), again, you'd have to look outside MBS, to Comshare Inc. or OutlookSoft Corp.
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