Microsoft outlines roadmap, unveils CRM Live

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Microsoft has a made a series of product and strategy announcements affecting its future business application plans, at its annual Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver.

The event was used to announce that Windows Server 2008 - codenamed Longhorn - as well as updates to SQL Server and Visual Studio would launch worldwide next 27 February.

The software giant also unveiled its next foray into territory more usually occupied by software-as-service (SaaS) leaders, NetSuite, Salesforce and SugarCRM, with a hosted version of its Dynamics customer relationship management (CRM) software, Live.

The product announcements accompanied news that Microsoft is also updating its channel programme to help its 600,000-strong partner ecosystem capitalise on its evolution towards chief executive Steve Ballmer differentiates as "software plus services".

"For software plus services, the time is now," Ballmer said, adding that the company plans to continue developing its products for use on-premises. But he pointed to recent to the recent launch of Silverlight, Microsoft's multimedia plug-in to rival Adobe's Flash, as an area that would be key to delivering increasingly browser-based application functionality.

Microsoft chief operating officer, Kevin Turner told delegates the company's Office Live products are being used by more than 400,000 small businesses and its Live hosted line would prove a growing opportunity for partners. "I fully believe that in two to three years, Office Live will be one of the top three or four deployed products by Microsoft," he said.

With Dynamics CRM Live, Microsoft said new and existing partners will be able to easily develop and deploy pre-packaged solutions for their customers on a monthly subscription basis, just as they can in the on-premise and partner-hosted versions of Microsoft CRM today. Because the Microsoft CRM Live service will share the same meta-driven configuration tools that are used in other versions of Microsoft CRM, partners will be able to develop pre-packaged applications once and deploy them across any of the three deployment options.

But SaaS provider Salesforce criticised the pricing of Dynamics Live, which at $59 (£29.15) per user per month, is much lower than all its competitors.

Marc Benioff, Salesforce chief executive was unsurprisingly disparaging with his comments in response to the CRM Live launch: "When you have an inferior product you have to have an inferior price," he said. "That is why Zune [Microsoft's digital music player] is priced below iPod; why Windows CE [mobile operating system] is priced below BlackBerry; and why Microsoft CRM is priced below Salesforce."

He said Microsoft CRM still lacks many of the key features customers demand today, which is why Gartner ranked it below both Salesforce and Siebel on the 2007 magic quadrant out last week.

"I think that CRM Live will do for the category what the Zune has done for music players," he added.

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