Shared platform boosts service delivery

Like local authorities across the country, Northumberland’s Castle Morpeth Borough Council and Alnwick District Council are always on the lookout for ways to improve the cost effectiveness of their services. In a effort to give their residents better value for money, the councils decided in late 2006 to implement a new customer relationship management (CRM) system across the two boroughs. Deployment of the system began in February and it has already drastically reduced the two councils’ running costs while providing a more transparent management process.

The two councils, which serve neighbouring communities to the north of Newcastle Upon Tyne, operate a shared ICT team that supports 600 users across six sites.

The arrangement has worked well, but recently it became apparent that there was room for efficiency improvements in the system according to Mike Kenworthy, ICT partnership manager.

“When I came here from Sunderland council in 2006, there was a lot to look at in terms of the CRM system’s efficiency and performance. We were using a CRM system from Northgate Information Solutions, but it was expensive to run and the users hated it; it slowed them down rather than speeding them up,” he said.

As a first step to finding a replacement CRM package, the ICT team thoroughly analysed the boroughs’ requirements. Residents, council staff and businesses were all asked about what they wanted and expected from a CRM system. In the meantime, Kenworthy looked into the types of solution that had been deployed by other councils.

“What we were looking for was a system that could support workflow tracking, give customers more channels to access their information, and integrate with the council’s mobile working staff,” said Kenworthy.

The ICT team first heard about Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM suite when representatives from the software firm paid a routine visit to discuss the councils’ current licensing agreements for products such as SQL Server.

“By the time Microsoft came knocking we knew we could not continue with our original system, so we arranged a CRM product demonstration with Microsoft and IT consultancy Optevia in order to get buy-in from the entire department,” said Kenworthy.

The councils were pleased to discover that the new system would lead to substantial savings from the outset, according to Kenworthy.

“With the previous system, we paid £250,000 for implementation and then spent £30,000 on maintenance. Optevia charged £50,000 for the full implementation and we also saved massively on maintenance. As part of the enterprise agreement, we pay Microsoft £200 a year,” he explained.

Optevia’s wealth of experience in delivering CRM solutions for public sector organisations helped the deployment to go smoothly, Kenworthy said. Rather than starting from scratch, the councils were able to make use of Optevia’s Local Government Template, featuring a range of pre-built business processes, integrations and workflows. Optevia also introduced specific customisations to suit Castle Morpeth and Alnwick Councils as it went along.

The first part of the implementation based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM went live in February 2008 and currently supports 50 per cent of the councils’ customer interactions.

At Castle Morpeth Borough Council, the services covered include forms handling and distribution, general enquiries, household waste management, bulky item collection, pest control, planning control and licensing of taxis.

Alnwick District Council chose different areas for the first phase of its rollout, covering such things as housing repairs, tourism processes, job applications, pest control and management of wheelie bins.

Under the councils’ shared service agreement, all staff use the same CRM system, but each borough’s staff can only access data pertaining to their own residents.
One notable benefit of the new system compared with the old is increased transparency, according to Kenworthy.

“The workflow tracking allows us to monitor back-office work and how effectively staff process requests,” he said. “From the customer’s perspective, it gives them increased trust in the system as well.”

Another benefit of the new system is that it ensures the validity of data. “The trouble with the old database was that once council staff entered a request, we couldn’t always retrieve it,” Kenworthy said.

The new CRM system is integrated with the web, so staff can deal with customers online. “There are so many things council residents can now do online. For example, they can request their washing machine to be taken away. We live in a rural area, and they either had to come in or phone in before,” explained Kenworthy.

Staff cuts are a common outcome when systems that automate manual processes are deployed, but Kenworthy said there had been no job losses in the ICT department. “It just means that customers who ring in get increased efficiency because there are more staff available to answer the phones,” he said.

The CRM system is also supporting the councils’ new mobile working strategy. “Microsoft CRM Mobile is being piloted in refuse collection, whereby staff can log people’s requests there and then, when they are out in the field,” Kenworthy said.
The CRM deployment also presented the councils with an opportunity to explore the benefits of virtualisation.

“Communication rooms need a lot of power and efficiency, so before we rolled out the Microsoft CRM solution, we thought it would be the right opportunity to introduce virtual servers and desktops to further reduce costs and our carbon footprint,” explained Kenworthy. Bringing in virtual desktops would complement the council’s teleworking agenda, he said.

The council wanted to avoid introducing a lot of additional servers to run the new CRM application, and Dell seemed to offer the best virtual solution, Kenworthy said. Dell also worked with Optevia to ensure compatibility with the new CRM system.
The CRM system runs on VMware infrastructure, using three Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers linked to an EMC storage area network (SAN).

The ICT department plans to integrate Microsoft Dynamics CRM with back-office systems such as planning, revenues and benefits, and with its Comino document management system. Microsoft CRM Mobile will also be rolled out across other departments.

Microsoft Announces General Availability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online

Microsoft Corp. today announced the general availability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, an on-demand customer relationship management service hosted and managed by Microsoft. The new Internet service delivers a full suite of marketing, sales and service capabilities through a Web browser or directly into Microsoft Office and Outlook.

It provides "instant-on" access to businesses that want a full-featured CRM solution with no IT infrastructure investment or setup required. Businesses can learn more about Microsoft's strategy for delivering next-generation CRM solutions from a new webcast being launched today at http://offers.crmchoice.com/, featuring Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Martha Rogers from the Peppers and Rogers Group.

"At Microsoft, we're revolutionizing how companies deploy marketing, sales and service solutions to users within their organization," said Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM at Microsoft. "Microsoft Dynamics CRM delivers the power of choice to customers, with a familiar and productive user experience and a multitenant platform that enables fast on-premise implementations or 'instant-on' deployments over the Internet."

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online reinforces Microsoft's broad software plus services strategy for delivering integrated business solutions over the Internet, and it is a part of Microsoft's multibillion-dollar investment in global datacenters. In addition to full access through a zero-footprint browser client, the new service delivers marketing, sales and service information within a native Microsoft Office experience, integrated with the desktop tools that employees already use every day, enabling businesses to ramp up end-user adoption and productivity rapidly.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is initially packaged in two service offerings:

- Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Professional delivers a full suite of CRM capabilities with extensive configurability and extensibility options. Businesses get 5 GB of data storage, 100 configurable workflows and 100 custom entities. The Professional edition is priced at $44 per user per month, with an introductory offer of $39 per user, per month.

- Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Professional Plus delivers all the capabilities of the Professional version plus offline data synchronization with expanded data storage, workflow and customization options that give businesses 20 GB of data storage, 200 configurable workflows and 200 custom entities. The Professional Plus edition is priced at $59 per user per month.

More than 500 customers and 200 partners have used Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online over the past six months via the Microsoft Early Access Program.

"In today's fast-changing business environment, we needed a system that our people could easily pick up and start effectively managing our customer relationships with," said Lori McIntosh, founder and managing partner of Lure Executive Services. "We tried Salesforce.com but it was just too hard to adapt it to our business. Microsoft's new on-demand service is fast to deploy and highly cost-effective with winning business benefits and, because it's highly configurable, a far better fit for our rapidly evolving needs."

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online delivers more capabilities at a better price than competing on-demand products, driving higher business productivity while reducing risk and total cost of ownership. For example, based on publicly available information from Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Professional Edition gives businesses the following:

- 5 GB of storage versus 1 GB in Salesforce.com Professional Edition

- 100 workflows versus none in Salesforce.com Professional Edition

- 100 configurable entities versus 50 in Salesforce.com Professional Edition

- Significant cost savings and a dramatically lower total cost of ownership at $44 per user, per month versus $65 per user per month or more for Salesforce.com Professional Edition.

"Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online presents partners with a great opportunity to reach broad new market segments," said Ryan Toenies, vice president of CRM at Inetium LLC. "The product is functionally impressive and truly demonstrates the investment Microsoft has made in the on-demand space. We are very excited to be working closely with Microsoft to deliver powerful solutions that solve real customer needs."

Availability
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is available in English in the United States and Canada. International rollout beyond the United States and Canada has not been announced, but Microsoft partners today offer hosted versions of Microsoft Dynamics CRM in many countries around the world.

Microsoft CRM Online: not so sharp

Let me start off by offering grudging congratulations to Microsoft, which took the wraps off CRM Online today, for finally acknowledging that it has to totally re-architect its software to be able to offer it on demand. Tim O’Brien, senior director of platform strategy for Microsoft, spelt it out in a media briefing today:

Dynamics CRM is the first product that Microsoft has rearchitected for multitenancy, and to do so, the company had to fully rewrite the program, he said.

“We’re not as far down the path of rearchitecting on the Exchange and SharePoint side, but that is directionally the way we’re headed,” he said. “We have a huge portfolio of applications that we’ll over time take in this direction.”

Rearchitecting for multitenancy includes the following key actions, he explained:

* Making sure it can support millions of users rather than stopping at the tens of thousands typically expected at the high end of enterprise software.
* Partitioning user content so customers can’t access each other’s data.
* Supporting high levels of client-side configuration so that individual users can design user interfaces or presentation skins to suit them.
* Ensuring that one customer running high usage or a bad query can’t take down the system for everyone else.

This much is good, and of course Microsoft has the market presence to make some headway with CRM Online. But I can’t agree with Josh Greenbaum’s assertion last week that the product is going to be a big challenge for Salesforce.com this year [disclosure: Salesforce.com is a client].

For one thing, the assertion that CRM Online is a winner because customers can choose between hosted and on-premise doesn’t strike true to me. According to Tim O’Brien, quoted above, the software is optimized for multi-tenancy — so installing it on-premise is presumably sub-optimal. That doesn’t sound like a level choice to me.

But what really lets the product down I think is this notion that the integration to Office and other on-premise Microsoft products will make it a winner. This really exposes everything that’s wrong with the software-plus-services strategy, in which software delivered as a service remains subservient to old-fashioned on-premise server products. Microsoft’s supposedly low-cost pricing for CRM Online doesn’t really undercut Salesforce.com when you factor in all the integration servers you have to buy, install and maintain to get your desktop and on-premise apps working with the online services.

I think customers are pretty wise to this, and if they’re already committed to the Microsoft infrastructure, then maybe CRM Online won’t look too expensive. But Microsoft isn’t going to steal customers from Salesforce.com with this strategy. It’s a bit like the old razor and blades business model, except that it’s the wrong way round. Microsoft is selling the razor blades cheap so that it can make money on the razors. But why would anyone want to buy those razors unless they were locked in to doing so?

Microsoft CRM Announcement Fires Back At Salesforce/Google Deal

Today's rollout of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, the Microsoft-hosted version of its customer relations management software suite, represents a shot across the bow of arch-rivals Salesforce and Google in the Software as a Service (SaaS) space of functionality delivered on-demand from "the cloud."

I spent some time on the phone with Mark H. Corley, senior director, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Channel Strategy, who agreed with the his competitors that functionality "delivered from the cloud is the best experience for our customers."

But Corley claimed that last week's Salesfoogle announcement means the two companies are merely "catching up to what our customers are doing today," pointing out that Dynamics Online works as an extension of Outlook (or in a browser) and thus is totally integrated with productivity software.

More importantly he said, it's cheaper than Salesforce. The Professional edition (5 GB of data storage, 100 configurable workflows and 100 custom entities) is priced at $44 per user per month while Professional Plus (with 20 GB of data storage, 200 configurable workflows and 200 custom entities) costs $59 per user per month. According to Corley, Professional undercuts the equivalent Salesforce product by a third, while the Plus version costs about half of the equivalent Salesforce solution. "We're happy to change the whole price/value equation," he added.

Based on Dynamics CRM 4.0 introduced in December 2007, Dynamics CRM Online was formerly known as CRM Live.

While 4.0 is aimed at enterprises, and partner-hosted versions are aimed at companies who need to integrate CRM with vertical solutions and other technologies, Corley said that Dynamics CRM Online "fills the gap on the low end" by targeting smaller companies with 5-25 users and no IT resources in place.

Cost savings are important, but so is functionality, and you'll have to compare those for yourself. But if the savings aren't enough to make a small company switch CRM providers, they might be enough to convince newcomers to the CRM world to begin by dipping their toes in cheaper waters.

Analyst: Microsoft CRM not after big boys

Features-wise, Microsoft Dynamics CRM may not be as robust as its bigger competitors, but to judge it on that front may be missing the point altogether, says a Springboard analyst.

Microsoft's CRM (customer relationship management) product's strength is in its familiar interface and integration with the rest of the software giant's office applications suite, said Michael Barnes, vice president of software and Asia-Pacific research at Springboard Research, in an interview.

Barnes said Microsoft's approach to CRM is from the "contact and collaboration perspective via Outlook and Exchange...Instead of treating CRM as a distinct set of functions packaged as a separate application".

This angles Microsoft's offering effectively at the SMB (small and midsize business) segment, because such companies may only require several CRM functions, with workers operating mainly within Outlook for most tasks, said Barnes.

"For many of these companies, most communications and scheduling is performed in Outlook. Since CRM is how you deal with contacts, that should be done through the same interface," said Barnes, adding that for many SMBs, a full CRM suite may not be on their buy list in the first place.

For specialized functions and larger companies, Microsoft's CRM may therefore prove insufficient, noted Barnes.

He offered of a scenario where Microsoft's CRM may not be sufficient. Barnes said, generally, Outlook is not the tool of choice for helpdesks, so Microsoft CRM may not be the choice for larger companies which may want to route call inquiries directly to a sales force automation system.

Manish Chopra, Asia-Pacific marketing director for Microsoft's Dynamics products, said in an interview Microsoft is targeting CRM at a broader audience compared to its competitors' products.

According to Chopra, about 15 percent of the employees in large organizations are licensed to use CRM software, with a further half of that segment actually using it.

"But what most people do is fire up Outlook for their e-mail first thing in the morning...the level of integration with Outlook is what appeals to people," said Chopra.

Microsoft's competitors generally sell to the marketing or finance chiefs of a company but not the IT people, he said, adding that widespread CRM use cannot be implemented top-down but needs to appeal to a broader audience.

Close to half of Microsoft's CRM business in the region comes from SMBs, many of whom use portions of CRM functionality in their operations, said Chopra.

He said: "Many customers use CRM but may not call it CRM in the first place; it could be 'vendor management' or 'loyalty management', but it uses CRM tools."

On the threat posed by competitor Salesforce.com's extensive third party applications network, termed AppExchange, Chopra said Microsoft's own network of ISVs (independent software vendors) are similarly building applications to suit customers' varied needs.

With many of them located in the region, Chopra said they are in tune with niche needs of customers.

Microsoft released Dynamics CRM 4.0 in December last year.

Microsoft CRM Online Hunts Salesforce.com

The official GA release of Microsoft’s CRM Online offering is next week, and with it comes a new chapter in the life of Salesforce.com. To date Salesforce.com has lacked a major competitor that could be seen as a worthy opponent in terms of overall size, price, functionality, and marketing chops. Oracle has the marketing chops, and Siebel On Demand the functionality, but Oracle isn’t really going to challenge Salesforce.com on price. Zoho, which just launched a CRM on-demand offering, and various other permutations of both on demand and open source CRM products are able to challenge Salesforce.com on price, and maybe functionality, but Marc Benioff can frankly out-market any of these companies before he gets out of bed in the morning.

Now there’s Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. And the challenges for Salesforce.com can now begin. The goals of CRM Online are to match or beat Salesforce.com in feature/functionality, absolutely beat it in price, and with the combined power of the Microsoft brand and the ubiquitousness of the Outlook user base, seriously challenge Benioff’s hype machine on the marketing side. And they definitely have a chance at succeeding in all three.

I’m not going to parse the feature/functionality battle between the two at the individual function level here, but I can offer three main reasons why I think CRM Online needs to be taken seriously as an alternative to Salesforce.com. The first is Microsoft’s Outlook UI, known (though not always loved) by hundreds of millions of users. Love it or not, that user experience makes training for CRM Online a non-issue. Salesforce.com is pretty easy to use as well, but using Outlook is, for most desktop users, already intuitive.

Functional advantage #2 for Microsoft is the ability to shift between on-premise and on-demand, and mix and match the two. On-premise support is about customer choice, and lots of customers I know don’t want to be locked into on-demand any more than they want to be locked into any other deployment model. There are good business cases for on-demand deployment, and equally good ones for on-premise, and Microsoft CRM wants to support them both, something Salesforce.com simply cannot match.

Functional advantage #3 for Microsoft comes from Office integration. Right now this is an on-premise Office integration to CRM Online, which means that if you want to push sales data into an Excel spreadsheet, that spreadsheet can only reside locally. This is not equivalent to the on-demand integration that Salesforce.com is promising with Google’s Apps, but, as I don’t believe Google Apps are really ready for prime-time in the enterprise, I think the Office integration direct from the Outlook UI is a better functional advantage than either Salesforce.com’s Google Apps support or its own native Office support.

That’s the functional side. On the price side, CRM Online wants to seriously undercut Saleforce.com pricing, and is doing so by charging significantly less than Salesforce.com for both basic and premium functionality. At the top end, Microsoft wants $59 per user per month for functionality that would cost a Salesforce.com several hundred dollars per month. (Especially when you include the 20 gigs of storage that Microsoft offers for free, for which users of Salesforce.com would pay dearly for. For a comparison of Salesforce.com premium pricing, look at Ephraim Schwartz’s column on the subject.) I think it’s going to be largely impossible for Salesforce.com to institute any across-the-board pricing changes to match Microsoft, without watching its stock price collapse. So, on the pricing front, I think Microsoft has Salesforce.com beat cold.

Now for the hype side. That will be hard, as Benioff has proven time and time again. Deals like the Google Apps agreement play well, even if substantively they are a lacking in demonstrable market impact. Regardless, Benioff keeps pulling rabbits like Google out of his hat on a regular basis. But Microsoft has it’s much-vaunted market clout, and Brad Wilson, the GM in charge of CRM at Microsoft, is no wall flower either. And, once Microsoft can get its own platform-as-a-service, Office in the cloud story aligned with CRM Online, there’s going to be a lot to hype that, under the covers, will be more than just a fortuitous rabbit popping up in a cloud of smoke. A lot more.

A final point. The competition between Microsoft and Salesforce.com won’t be head to head at all levels, at least initially. Microsoft CRM Online is not being targeted today at the top tier customer base that Salesforce.com has been after, the challenge to Salesforce.com will come at Salesforce.com’s core mid-market, though Microsoft’s large SI partners, like EDS, are expected to bring CRM Online to the top tier customer base by hosting it in EDS’s data centers. This exclusive focus on the mid-market will likely change as the market shifts its attention to the new CRM on-demand kid on the block.

I’ve always contended that CRM on demand in general, with all due respect to all its adherents, is more of a commodity play than a strategic value play, particularly for the vast majority of deployments, which are mostly standalone and largely serving a contact management, sales force automation need. In this part of the market, the largest segment by far, Microsoft can and will excel, pun intended, against a Salesforce.com whose focus on a strategic marketing, sales, and pricing model makes it look more and more like it’s swimming against an increasingly strong tide. At the higher end of the strategic scale, the future is a little more cloudy, especially as I’m not convinced that Salesforce.com or Microsoft can really claim they know how on-demand CRM will work for these customers.

The hunt for Salesforce.com at Microsoft is on, which of the two contenders returns victorious will be one of the more interesting stories of 2008, and beyond.

Salesforce.com Deals with Google After Failing to Land Zoho

Zoho's product evangelist discusses the deal that never went down, dishing about Salesforce.com's corporate practices.Vegesna said Salesforce.com is spending too much on marketing and not enough on R&D.

Salesforce.com's fortified integration with Google could bolster both companies' strategies to tackle Microsoft in the applications market.

But the deal might not have happened if Salesforce.com acquired Zoho two years ago. That's what Zoho Evangelist Raju Vegesna told eWEEK in a phone interview April 14 following the publication of a controversial blog post by Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho parent company AdventNet.

Vegesna told eWEEK that as late as 2007, Salesforce.com and Zoho were in negotiations to be at least partners, if not to consummate an outright marriage.

The SAAS (software-as-a-service) business applications leader considered buying Zoho, Vegesna said, to leverage the company's collaboration software suite, which Zoho positions as an alternative to Google Apps and Microsoft's Office suite.

Such a deal appears to be all but dead now that Salesforce.com has proclaimed Google as its Apps platform of record.

Courtship Before Marriage

Salesforce.com declined to comment for this report, but Vegesna said Salesforce.com and Zoho began discussing a relationship, possibly even an acquisition in 2006.

However, Zoho's concern about Salesforce.com cost structure, which according to these estimates includes spending eight times more on marketing than research and development, prompted Zoho to offer to partner first.

"Let's date first before we get married," Vegesna said he recalled thinking. "We thought we'd experiment as an AppExchange partner, and if it goes well, maybe we'll take it up to the next step."

Zoho, one of the first Salesforce.com customers back in 1999 before it started using and selling its own Zoho CRM product, worked to integrate with Salesforce.com AppExchange in 2007.

But Salesforce.com pulled the plug a few days before it could go live, telling Zoho it could not work with AppExchange any longer because it had a competing product in Zoho CRM.

Later in 2007, Vegesna said Salesforce.com and Zoho rekindled conversations, discussing a possible acquisition. Financials were not discussed, and the talks didn't go well.

A deal was long dead even before April 14's Google-Salesforce.com bond, according to Vegesna, who echoed Vembu's blog when he said the company's corporate cultures were at odds.

"Hiring lots of salespeople is not good for a company," he said. "They cannot deliver affordable software." But part of the disparity, he admitted, is that Zoho prefers to remain private.

While Vegesna said Zoho operates under the "never say never" clause that most companies take, he agreed Salesforce.com is probably not going to come knocking again anytime soon.

He also questioned whether or not Salesforce.com and Google would be able to work together because Salesforce.com focuses on the enterprise while Google is pretty open to work with anyone. Some analysts agree.

IDC analyst Rachel Happe said Salesforce.com is serving some big accounts and needs the service-level agreements required by larger businesses, while Google targets businesses that want to pay little or nothing.

"That difference will likely cause tension in the relationship, but it will also likely grow over time," Happe told eWEEK April 14. "In the short term it gives Salesforce some publicity and a product extension, and it gives Google a go-to-market channel for its Apps product."

Gartner analyst Tom Austin told eWEEK April 14 the Salesforce.com-Google deal is designed to generate more press for cloud computing in the hope that it will generate longer-term dividends for Salesforce.com.

What those benefits are, he added, is unclear.

Source:eweek.com

Microsoft CRM Configurator Offered by Cincom

By David Sims
TMCnet Contributing Editor

Vendor Cincom Systems (News - Alert) has introduced Cincom's Sales and Product Configurator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The new configuration, company officials say, "captures the product, services, and business knowledge needed for guided selling, complex product and sales configuration, and proposal management."


Gregor Newland, channel manager, said the product allows partners to help clients improve such front-office processes such as guided selling, product configuration, estimating and bidding, and quotation and proposal management.

To the end-user, the interoperability is achieved with two simple buttons on the Microsoft (News - Alert) toolbar marked "New Configured Opportunity Product" and "Reconfigure Opportunity Product." These buttons open a Web-based version of Cincom's Sales and Product Configurator for Microsoft Dynamics and lists all of the products that can be configured.

The "new" button adds a new product to an opportunity after going through Cincom's configuration application. The "reconfigure" button does the same but for a product that has already been configured at least once. Products configured in the Cincom's Sales and Product Configurator are stored and routed in the Microsoft Dynamics applications.

Last month New Delhi-based Cincom announced the first release of its new selling and business acquisition software, Cincom Acquire. The product suite is described by company officials as an "end-to-end selling and business acquisition product for companies that sell complex products and services," designed to "fill the gaps in traditional CRM- and ERP-based systems strategies."

Built on the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server architecture, the product supports collaborative selling processes. "Our customers' product management, engineering and marketing divisions can now align information and strategies, and move that information closer to the sales cycle," company officials say.

The product integrates with "out-of-the-box" Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and integrates with other Microsoft Dynamics ERP systems.

Cincom Acquire's core components are used by manufacturers selling complex engineer-to-order or configure-to-order products to streamline their sales, design, and proposal processes. Cincom officials say their products can reduce proposal generation time from five days to 15 minutes, and decrease time to close a sale by 80 percent.

Cincom Acquire is currently nominated for Microsoft's Office Business Application of the Year.