Hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM vs Salesforce

Recently Microsoft announced a hosted version of its Dynamics CRM product at around $44.

The Salesforce guys must be watching this move closely, eventhough they are publicly pooh-poohing the move as no impact. Unless Salesforce goes specialty and vertical and really starts leveraging ApEx as the core to its strategy, its facing the daunting task of protecting its commodity CRM offerring. Commodities battles are fought through price wars and that's what MSFT seems to be dragging them into. While this is not over by any means, its an interesting start from MSFT.

Maybe SFDC goes really cozy with Google and lets users access its commodity CRM offerring through Google Apps. That might not be a bad route considering the fact that Google is beefing up on that side. Would Google buy SFDC, cant rule it out.

I'm also keeping an eye out on the post-IPO NetSuite moves. If you get the potential of ApEx out of the way, NetSuite actually has a more valuable SMB offerring in the OnDemand space. However its strategy and impact on SFDC would be totally lost if it gets acquired by a large company like Oracle.