Microsoft has been aggressively courting CRM users this week. First, they announced price cuts to their online productivity suite, and yesterday they lowered prices on their Dynamics CRM Online product. In addition to slashing prices, Microsoft is offering six months of free Dynamics CRM usage to Salesforce.com’s and Oracle’s CRM users.

The Business Productivity Suite, a SaaS offering, adopted a new pricing model and is now at $10 per user instead of $15 per user; Microsoft executives are attributing the discount to the recent increase in users. The suite includes Exchange Online (a messaging service), SharePoint Online, Live Meeting, and Office Communications Online, and was updated this month to increase mailbox storage space to 25 GB. In addition to price cuts, the Business Productivity Suite’s availability will be extended to Brazil, Hungary, Israel, and Mexico, to name a few.

The fight for the cloud application space doesn’t stop there: from now until the end of the year, customers of Salesforce.com and Oracle CRM can sign up for a free, six-month trial of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Before announcing the offering, Microsoft also combined their two CRM Online offerings—Professional and Professional Plus—into one version that has all the features of the latter, but the price of the former: $44 per user per month. There are some stipulations with the free-trial offer: users must be in the US or Canada, and have a minimum of five seats and a maximum of two-times the number of seats subscribed to under Salesforce or Oracle. When the six-month pilot lapses, subscribers will be charged $44 per user per month.

Sweetening the deal a bit, Microsoft has also given Dynamics CRM Online a service update this month (its third in 18 months), featuring enhanced data import and free mobile access. It will be interesting to see how Salesforce and Oracle respond, and especially if the trial and price cuts will indeed draw customers from those companies.

Small businesses tend to manage customer relationships through a number of different applications—documents, contact managers, spreadsheets, etc.—and it is those companies that have the most to gain from implementing a unified CRM system. To help quell some of the apprehensions and concerns small businesses may have with CRM, CRM Buyer recently outlined some tips to help SMBs get the most out of the service.

When introducing a CRM system to employees unaccustomed to using one, the most important step is get them to buy into the system. Without employee support and faith in the product, the product will have little worth and SMBs won’t see the ROI they hoped for. Also, every employee must be encouraged to use the platform, because some will likely eschew the system in favor of familiar methods they know have previously yielded success. It is therefore important to stress the benefits of CRM implementation will give the company, rather than the system’s features.

Training is also important for proselytizing employees. Ideally, training will be included with the purchase or subscription chosen, and online documentation, videos, and tutorials are also helpful. For teaching non-technical people, sometimes it is most effective to familiarize them with certain features that are most relevant to their role. Ongoing training for the office is necessary for keeping up with the system’s innovations.  CRM Buyer also recommends training users in groups—training at intervals will allow those first familiar with the system to help others.

Lastly, it is important to choose the right CRM platform. For small businesses, this often means a simple system. Managers should outline the company’s needs and then select a system based on those requisites, and not by the bells and whistles certain vendors may offer.

When it was launched two and a half years ago, the iPhone was in many ways the positioned as the non-enterprise smartphone. BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices were the phones for businessmen, and the iPhone offered that same functionality with an added cool factor. Needless to say, the iPhone has since had great success within enterprise and particularly within CRM, and given the astonishing growth of Apple’s App Store, things will only get better.

Aside from featuring the simple user interface characteristic of Apple devices, the iPhone’s success is largely due to its ability to offer many more software choices than its competitors do. While most of these applications aren’t relevant to business users, it is noteworthy that there are currently about 100,000 applications available for the iPhone; rival smartphones don’t even have 15,000 apps.

Despite not being positioned as a business phone, it was quickly targeted for enterprise goals. The year it was released, Salesforce.com made a lite CRM app in the form of a contact manager; the following year they released an app for their CRM subscribers to view and creating information, and Oracle did the same. And over the past year, CRM for iPhone has grown—SugarCRM and NetSuite have applications, and smaller CRM players are joining in. NetSuite recently released an ERP application for the iPhone, and while it currently only has viewing capability, editing functions are soon to come. This seemingly premature release of NetSuite’s app is definitely a view to the status of CRM applications for the iPhone. It isn’t a mature market, but it is a growing one, and these applications are constantly adding more capabilities and proliferating.

There is another player recently added to the mobile CRM application race—the Android—and Oracle and Salesforce.com have already reached out to HTC (the company making the phones) about developing programs. Droid has also eschewed enterprise positioning, but the phone’s compatibility with Google programs is attractive for enterprise users. Currently, one of the drawbacks in using the Android as a business phone is its lacking security, but these problems are not without solution. Whether the new Droids—or any competing smartphone—will surpass the iPhone in CRM and general enterprise use is tough to say. Only time will tell.

Sales force automation (SFA) has been growing steadily over the past few years, and the folks at CRM Buyer predict that when the economy leaves its slump, SFA will surge.

Most apparently, SFA is making inroads with new price points and offerings for different verticals. Catering to specific industries is a smart move to stay competitive; the change in pricing was a bigger necessity. A Gartner analyst noted that many companies subscribing to SaaS SFA platforms are nearing the end of their contracts, and are both shopping around and negotiating lower prices for the service already in use. In addition, there’s been an emerging demand for role-based pricing.

Several CRM sectors have seen boosts with the downturn, and SFA is one of them—companies looking to do more with less money frequently turned to automated systems. However, the “more with less” motto is not a recession-era fad, as it’s always trendy to save money, so SFA is expected to do well after the economic decline.

With this expected increase in demand, new technologies are surfacing: Shadetree Technologies recently released an application that marries marketing automation and SFA. Whether or not more such apps emerge, SFA will likely see a boost through the purchase of marketing automation applications, as they work best in an SFA environment. And many SFA applications are getting service information integrations, which will help sales departments learn more about customers.

CRM Buyer did point out a slightly surprising absence: Facebook. While other enterprise systems are enjoying the information and opportunities created by social networking, SFA applications are eschewing them. LinkedIn still interests vendors because it maintains a professional tone throughout, but Facebook (and probably Twitter) are too unstructured and leisurely, and serve mostly as distraction.

Not long ago, CDC Software announced plans to acquire on-demand companies in order to create one SaaS software solutions provider to complement its on-premise products for various verticals. Last week, CDC announced they have signed a binding term sheet for the future acquisition of a SaaS provider for not-for-profit (NFP) organizations; the name of the company was not disclosed.

Given the rise of SaaS—a recent global study by Avanade consultancy shows that within 2009 alone, the number of companies using only on-premise solutions decreased from 61% to 41%—this is a smart move for CDC to offer customers multiple deployment options. It is even smarter to offer a combination, as the hybrid SaaS model is proliferating at light speed. CDC plans to take these SaaS and on-premise offerings worldwide, via 22 offices and 1200 resellers and partners. In terms of the NFP vertical solution, business should be good—market research shows there are 1.5 million registered NFPs in North America alone, and SaaS solutions are extremely cost-effective. The soon-to-be-acquired company is venture-capital financed, and provides solutions for ERP, CRM, financial management, e-commerce and others, in one platform.

This pending acquisition will also be fruitful for other CDC solutions: it will provide cross-selling opportunities for CDC MarketFirst and CDC Respond by expanding product functionality into marketing automation, lead management, and complaint and feedback management. Full procurement of the unnamed company is expected by the end of 2009.

Cloud computing is here to stay, which is a certainty that even Larry Ellison embraces, even for all his posturing with Salesforce.com founder—and self-proclaimed “cloud-computing evangelist”—Marc Benioff. Last week at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, Ellison announced that a full version of Oracle Fusion applications would be available next year, marking the company’s first serious SaaS offering.

Prior to Ellison’s keynote announcement of Oracle Fusion apps, the other buzzed-about speech was the one given by Benioff, mostly because he and Ellison have exchanged thinly-veiled insults for quite a while. Ellison has historically balked at cloud-computing, even though he was one of Salesforce’s first investors. During his speech, Benioff painted Oracle as a bit of a straggler for their favoring on-premise solutions, but also made digs about Oracle’s being more suited to large enterprises, while Salesforce is accessible to businesses of all sizes. Even though Oracle products have been a ground station for many cloud-computing vendors (including Salesforce.com, which uses the Oracle database to support its service), perhaps Benioff’s presence and speech were more a nod to Oracle’s future in SaaS than anything else.

Of course, just because Oracle has pledged to the cloud-computing club doesn’t mean initiation will be easy: some tech pundits note that making a shift to SaaS at this stage of the “game” could mean having to change your business model. Still, Oracle will have a solid stable of on-premise products to cushion the blow of any on-demand failures. There is also the fact that while cloud-computing is wildly popular (and undoubtedly the future), legacy applications haven’t been eradicated yet, and there is still a demand for traditional licensing.

The outpouring of Oracle OpenWorld news continues: Samsung SDS and Oracle have co-developed a native mobile CRM application. Last week, demonstrations of the new application were held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, but the week prior the product had a “soft debut” in San Diego that was met with positive reviews.

The application is for Samsung smartphones and is based on Oracle Siebel CRM, and will run on the Samsung Mobile Cloud Center (SMCC). The first release is for pharmaceutical companies, but Samsung SDS plans to develop similar CRM applications for other verticals. Oracle already offers mobile version of its CRM system, but it is a basic rendering in comparison to the new Samsung collaboration, which has more features. Some of the advancements include a hub-and-spoke graphic to show users their customers’ connections—as opposed to Oracle’s original spreadsheet for displaying such associations—communication records built into customer profiles, and complex graphs.

At OpenWorld, Oracle’s Anthony Lye spoke to the importance to moving toward mobile in the future, so it is no surprise that this CRM offering is only the first of Samsung’s projected efforts to target the enterprise market. In this regard, Samsung will concentrate on its Windows Mobile phones in 2010, and plans to continue to focus on applications as well as devices by maintaining partnership with Oracle.

Two weeks ago, the annual CRM Expo was held in Nuremberg, Germany, and SugarCRM client 3Dconnexion was awarded the 2009 CRM Best Practice Award. The award is most certainly a testament to the value and capabilities SugarCRM delivers to its customers, and 3Dconnexion is the third SugarCRM customer to win the award, and it is also the third such win for Insignio, SugarCRM’s German partner who managed the implementation.

3Dconnexion is a subsidiary of Logitech, and the award was given in the “CRM Launch” category for their use of SugarCRM as a global customer management platform. 3Dconnexion develops control devices for a wide variety of users, from gamers to product designers, and is headquartered in Fremont, CA, with European headquarters near Munich. The previous CRM system was spread across multiple databases, and they turned to SugarCRM for a consolidation solution for online marketing, sales, services and reporting.

The SugarCRM deployment includes key integrations to tie the CRM system into Google Maps, the company’s e-commerce platform and partner portal. It also serves employees in seven languages in Europe and the United States, and 3Dconnexion’s next step will be implementation in Japan. Thus far, it’s been a good fall for SugarCRM, as they were also recently awarded “Best Open Source Technology” by CRM Magazine.

Keynote speeches at Oracle OpenWorld (which wrapped up yesterday), didn’t necessarily announce radically new concepts, but that certain strategies were promoted at this well-attended event speaks to the certainty of future changes in Oracle’s CRM development. And of course, it will be interesting to see who follows in their footsteps now that this gauntlet has been thrown.

Oracle CFO Safra Catz spoke to some upcoming changes and Oracle’s recent acquisitions. One of her main points was that Oracle was a strong vendor in many industries, but perhaps had not been doing enough to connect their products so that the user wouldn’t have to do this task themselves. The company’s acquisitions are meant to mollify this situation, and make solutions work together. Joel Koppelman, head of project management at 2008 acquisition Primavera, spoke of customers’ demand for integrations to be prepackaged; something Oracle will produce more of in the future.

But it was Anthony Lye, SVP of CRM, who detailed the three strategies that will change the face of Oracle CRM. In a discussion with other executives regarding specific strategies for Oracle Siebel and Oracle CRM On Demand, Lye stated that the fundamentals in the coming year would be: executing the cross-channel customer experience flawlessly, tapping into the power of the social web, and delivering CRM data when, how and where users need it. More specifically, customers start and end in different channels, and are using more mobile data as well, and Lye wants to move toward seamless transitions. This is also important to the third point—supporting the user’s need to access CRM data from pretty much anywhere. And in terms of utilizing social media, Lye thinks it’s especially important that CRM foster customer-to-customer relationships, which is a less-discussed reason for racing to social networking.

Last week, InsideView announced enhancements to its integration of SalesView with both Oracle CRM and Siebel CRM applications. InsideView is a proponent of social media and self-proclaimed leaders of the “Sales 2.0” push, and these latest updates to the SalesView product are a move in support of Oracle’s Social CRM initiative.

SalesView goes beyond the average social enterprise application in that it analyzes information across both traditional sources within a CRM application and emerging social media to present sales opportunities. These prospects are presented within the CRM system, and the latest improvements allow greater coverage for international companies and SMBs.

SalesView is powered by the InsideView Smart Cloud, and is thus the first marketing intelligence solution allowing on-demand addition and validation of content. Naturally, SalesView users enjoy other benefits of cloud computing, like real-time information retrieval from social networking platforms and data resources. SalesView presents these news alerts and relationship analysis natively within the Oracle and Siebel CRM platforms, and content from SalesView can be exported to create or modify account and lead information.

In singing his praise of SalesView, Oracle’s Senior Vice President, Anthony Lye, noted that the integration would result in a combined solution surely invaluable “to even the world’s largest enterprises.” Though InsideView focuses on SMBs, Lye certainly has a point. Though many companies balk at the notion of Enterprise 2.0, it’s unlikely that companies eschewing these principles will flourish, and SalesView’s analytical capacity makes it more than just a social networking tool, and places it head and shoulders above other social media products.