Use the links on this page to see how Microsoft compares to other business management software by reviewing customer stories, white papers, expert opinions, and analyst reports.
Your business may currently use products from other software vendors, or you may consider such products and wonder how Microsoft Dynamics compares. Here is information that can help you compare Microsoft Dynamics with another vendor's product.
As a critical, well-educated audience, industry experts are familiar with many of the business and technology issues that you face every day. Their insightful commentary may help you to decide if Microsoft Dynamics is the solution of advantage for you.
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Case Study: High 5 Sportswear Scores Big With A Smart SaaS CRM Implementation (Pete Marston and Bill Band, May 7, 2008, .pdf file, 76 kb): "Microsoft’s commitments to the business applications market and moving forward with all four ERP products, as well as a long-term commitment to software plus services. It also showed a company with a vision: supporting a diverse set of customer shapes and sizes with a blend of hosted services and on-premise software."
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Microsoft CRM Online Hunts Salesforce.com (Josh Greenbaum, ZDNet, April 18, 2008): "Josh points out that Dynamics CRM Online is initially being targeted for the mid-market, and notes that the competition between Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics won’t be head-to-head just yet because Microsoft isn’t at the point where it’s targeting the top tier customer base Salesforce has been after. He does contend, however, that as Microsoft’s large SI partners (e.g., EDS) bring Dynamics CRM Online to their top tier customer base by hosting it in EDS’s data centers, other top tier folks will start to look more seriously at it."
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Microsoft Dynamics Gets Renewed Focus (Forrester Research, April 1, 2008, .pdf file, 181 kb): "With its innovative role-based user experience, improved reporting and BI capabilities, and improving platform harmonization, Microsoft Dynamics products should be on ERP selection shortlists for a variety of SMBs, particularly those that use Microsoft’s server-based products."
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Microsoft and EDS Go After the Contact Center, Together (AMR Research, March 21, 2008, .pdf file, 148 kb): "The partnership between Microsoft and EDS opens up client acquisition opportunities for both vendors in the burgeoning customer management and business process outsourcing (CM BPO) market. In an extension to the strategic relationship the two companies have had in place for some time, EDS has now also become a Dynamics CRM partner and will focus specifically on providing consulting and services for application areas, such as contact centers and sales force automation (SFA)."
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Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Service Contact Centers, 2008 (Gartner, March 19, 2008, .pdf file, 148 kb): "The challenge during the next five years for business buyers interested in improving customer service in their contact centers will be to find software suppliers that understand that the central focus of CRM has changed from enabling the agent to enabling the end customer/consumer. The current generation of CRM application providers in the customer service contact center space lags user needs. The major enterprise application providers excel at commodity tasks, such as product selection, order management, payment, account setup and basic support."
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Convergence 2008: Microsoft Is Serious About Business Applications (Simon Jacobson and Nigel Montgomery, March 15, 2008, .pdf file, 163 kb): "With its innovative role-based user experience, improved reporting and BI capabilities, and improving platform harmonization, Microsoft Dynamics products should be on ERP selection shortlists for a variety of SMBs, particularly those that use Microsoft’s server-based products."
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Microsofts Platform as a Service Plans: Putting the Pieces Together (Josh Greenbaum, ZDNet, March 14, 2008): “Josh pieced together the announcements from ODC and Convergence to argue that Microsoft is building out its S+S and PaaS strategy in a 'stealthy way' and beginning to deliver 'what looks like a very strong and impressive set of initiatives.' Josh says that he sees the common underlying S+S strategy in these announcements but comments that he thinks it’s being communicated in a disconnected way. He’d like to see one person from MS stand up and articulate it cohesively, and he specifically references Stephen Elop as the possible man to do it.”
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The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Apps Software Licensing And Pricing, Q4 2007 (Forrester Research, Oct. 15, 2007, .pdf, 572 kb): “Extensive efforts at streamlining software and licensing for Microsoft Business Solutions have paid off. Microsoft has maintained its client-friendly concurrent user license and aligned its packaging and pricing across the Microsoft Dynamics line.”
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Microsoft Business Solutions Leads In Enterprise Apps Software Licensing And Pricing For SMBs The Forrester Wave™ Vendor Summary, Q4 2007 (Forrester Research, October 12, 2007, .pdf, 208 kb): Extensive efforts at streamlining software and licensing for Microsoft have paid off. Microsoft has maintained its client-friendly concurrent user license and aligned its packaging and pricing across the Microsoft Dynamics line. Business Ready Licensing, launched in July 2006, eliminates the module and SKU complexity of legacy pricing schemes in favor of a user based licensing approach. Microsoft earned the top slot in the SMB edition, and is among the top three in the large enterprise edition, of the survey due to extensive support for provisions in the enterprise software licensee bill of rights.
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Personas Drive Microsoft Dynamics UI Design (Forrester Research, October 5, 2007, .pdf, 1.73 mb): Microsoft Dynamics Global User Experience Group continues to push the development of better persona-based user interfaces and usability for its Dynamics product line. The team employs contextual analysis, usability labs, and desirability studies to develop role-based personas and corresponding user interfaces (UIs) that are familiar and easy to use.
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The Dynamic Business Applications Imperative (Forrester Research, Sept. 24, 2007, .pdf): “Enterprise applications will be transformed by “design for people, build for change.” The packaged applications vendors have already started to respond with improvements to their existing products, and, eventually, they will embrace new architectures. Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM is a good example of “design for people” because it allows sales executives to access CRM functionality from the systems they work in every day: Outlook, Word, or Excel.”
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Microsoft Leads in Record-Centric Customer Service Management Software: The Forrester Wave™ Vendor Summary, Q2 2007 (Forrester Research, May 24, 2007, .pdf, 199 kb): "Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which delivers sufficient customer service capabilities at a low cost, has emerged as a leader among customer record-centric products. Although not as functionally rich in core customer service capabilities, Microsoft compensates through its architecture, integration, usability, and business strategy. The product shines in its ability to support agents through phone agent, blended agent, and agent collaboration tools — all of which sit on top of a solid workflow engine. In the future, look for Microsoft to exploit its Customer Care Framework, a modular XML Web Services architecture for rapid development and deployment of contact center solutions."
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Microsoft Outscores SAP in a Comparative Assessment of ERP Usability (March 2007): In a recent study of the impact of enterprise software applications on individual business productivity, Microsoft Dynamics users on average scored Microsoft 18% higher than SAP users scored SAP applications. This Microsoft-sponsored study was conducted by Keystone Strategy, an independent research firm, and was supervised by Dr. Marco Iansiti, the David Sarnoff Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School.
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The Forrester Wave™: Midmarket CRM Suites, Q1 2007 (Forrester, February 21, 2007, .pdf , 516 kb): The Microsoft brand gives Microsoft Dynamics CRM major momentum. Microsoft Dynamics CRM is one of the newer products included in our evaluation, but the vendor has made impressive progress building out its solution, which emerged as a Leader for the first time in a Forrester Wave.
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The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise CRM Suites, Q1 2007 (Forrester Research, Feb. 5, 2007, .pdf, 488K): Microsoft Dynamics CRM was rated a Strong Performer in this Forrester Wave. Forrester applied two sets of criteria weightings to this analysis, one appropriate for large enterprise wide deployments and another focused on midmarket priorities - the two sets of criteria were then used to evaluate and position the solutions.
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Microsoft Financing Update: Getting a Good Deal (Forrester Research, Inc., Jan. 17, 2007, .pdf, 72K): This Forrester Quick Take examines Microsoft's new financing offerings and concludes that the offerings are "easy to buy, attractively priced, and totally separated from the product and sales divisions of the organization. "The Quick Take also comments, "there really isn't much of a downside."
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Microsoft Munich Mission: Remaking MBS With Modern Infrastructure Stack, Channel Initiatives (IDC, Nov. 2006, .pdf, 100K): This IDC Insight by Bo Lykkegaard, Erik Bruin and Albert Pang highlights the roadmap of the Microsoft Dynamics product line based on announcements and executive interaction at Convergence EMEA 2006. The authors note that Microsoft Dynamics has a renewed focus and increased investments both at the product and at the channel marketing levels. The main themes referenced in this report about the entire product line include the Microsoft Office user interface, the collaborative processes taking place, the visibility and responsiveness, and collaborative communities around Microsoft Dynamics and Snap. The authors proceed to delve deeper into these four themes and provide specific examples.
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Microsoft Unveils "Convergence" of CRM and the Desktop (AMR Research, Nov. 9, 2006, .pdf, 144K): This AMR Research Article Alert Article focuses on the announcement made at Convergence EMEA 2006 about the new version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. In this Article Alert, Robert Bois notes that "the new version of Dynamics CRM, which will become available upon the impending release of Office 2007, takes advantage of a number of different elements inherent to both the new operating system and Office suite."
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SPLA - blah, blah, blah? (Ovum, Nov. 2006, .pdf, 44K): This report is a result of announcements made at Convergence EMEA 2006 about Microsoft's extension of its Service Provider Licensing Agreement (SPLA) to the Microsoft Dynamics ERP solutions, which allows partners to pay for the licenses they use on a monthly basis. According to David Mitchell, this radically improves the cost model for Microsoft partners offering software as a service (SaaS), either as a standalone offering or embedded in a wider business offering, such as managed services, BPO or newly created products and services. In this report David Mitchell examines the announcements and the positive impact it will have in the market.
Microsoft Dynamics Emerges From Wave 1 (Forrester Research, April 20, 2006, .pdf, 108K): A recent Forrester report details the Microsoft Dynamics strategy, noting that Microsoft Business Solutions can set the bar for applications usability by leveraging a people-centric approach and Microsoft's Office and SharePoint conventions. Forrester states that Microsoft is edging closer to competitive parity against established Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) vendors.
Microsoft Dynamics solutions frequently garner industry awards because of their innovation, business value, usability, and other strengths. Considering the reasoning behind recent awards may help you determine whether Microsoft Dynamics is a good choice for your business.
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CustomerSource named one of top 10 international support sites CustomerSource, a Web site for Microsoft Dynamics customers, was selected as one of the top 10 international support sites by the Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA) and the Association of Support Professionals (ASP) in 2006.
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How Microsoft Compares
