Gartner Reports Eye-Popping Numbers on Dynamics CRM in its Recently Updated CRM Market Share Report

From the standpoint of Dynamics CRM, Gartner’s just-updated CRM market share report is very interesting. Here’s a link to the article: “CRM Software Market Share Analysis, Worldwide 2008“. Here are my biggest takeaways:

• Even in a down economy, the CRM category overall grew by 12.5%.
• The move to Software as a Service (SaaS) was one of the big drivers, increasing from 15% to 20% of the total market between 2007 and 2008.
• Salesforce.com and Dynamics CRM were the growth leaders, with Salesforce growing revenue by almost 43%. Dynamics CRM grew at an eye-popping 75% rate from 2007 to 2008! 

The market share numbers are interesting as well: according to Gartner, only Microsoft (from 4.1 to 6.4%) and Salesforce (from 8.3 to 10.6%) gained share. SAP, while still the overall share leader (22.5%), actually saw a revenue drop of almost 1%.

Based on my experience, it’s not surprising that a lot of Dynamics CRM’s rapid growth is being driven by the movement to “cloud” computing. I’ve been impressed with Microsoft’s SaaS offering — Dynamics CRM Online — since it was first released over a year ago, and I finally pulled the trigger and migrated my company’s production CRM environment to CRM Online.

In addition to the standard arguments in favor of moving to a SaaS/hosted platform (rapid time to value, no infrastructure or installation requirements, automatic updates…), Dynamics CRM has an important unique advantage: regardless of which way you go – on-premise or online – it’s the same fundamental architecture. With a few relatively small exceptions, all of the customizations and configurations you make in one environment work and can be easily migrated to the other. I’ve talked to plenty of clients in the last few years who went with Salesforce.com simply because they wanted a SaaS solution and Microsoft didn’t have one. Now, not only does Microsoft have an increasingly popular hosted CRM option, but they’re unique among the leading vendors in separating your choice of CRM architecture from your choice of a hosted or on-premise platform.

When to Customize Dynamics CRM, when to Extend it?

With the emergence of Dynamics CRM as the “XRM” application platform, I get a lot of questions about the techniques you can use to build those applications. By convention, we use the term customizing to mean “things you can do without writing code”, and extending for “things that do require code”. There’s a three-day training course — Customization and Configuration of Dynamics CRM 4.0 — that covers the no-code side of things. It’s a great course, and I use it as the foundation for private training, workshops and mentoring engagements.

You can only go so far without code, however. With some .NET programming and a little Jscript you can extend Dynamics CRM in some very powerful ways. Extending Dynamics CRM 4.0 is a great 3-day course that’s a natural follow-on to the Customizing topic. If you need to learn things like application event programming, customizing the CRM UI, programming web services, custom workflows, plug-ins, and building custom ASP.NET applications on top of Dynamics CRM, you should consider this course.

Here’s an article I recently wrote that describes the training content we use for Dynamics CRM
(and SharePoint), and the advantages of our skills-centric service delivery model.

For more information about how we can help get you & your team up to speed on customizing and extending Dynamics CRM, please visit our CRM Developer landing page.

Dynamics CRM User Group Meeting on Mobility Solutions, July
30

The DCRMUG July meeting is all about mobility solutions for Dynamics CRM, and we’ve got SoftBridge and CWR Mobility lined up to present. I hope you can join us at 3:00 PM, Thursday 7/30. In person at the Microsoft Downers Grove office, or online. Register here: www.DynamicsCRMUserGroup.com/register