REDMOND, Wash. — March 14, 2006 — Microsoft Corp. today announced that since its introduction in December 2005, Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM 3.0 has been deployed by a broad range of enterprise-scale businesses, many of which comprise thousands of CRM users. The growing adoption worldwide of Microsoft® CRM in corporations and their divisions reflects how Microsoft CRM is meeting the demand for a solution that provides the right level of functionality and extensibility to serve the needs of diverse global enterprises.
Recent enterprise customers include the following:
-
H&R Block Inc., a leading U.S. tax service provider, has a previous deployment of 1,500 seats of Microsoft CRM. It has added 500 additional seats for the launch of a new line of business and has a five-year plan to deploy 6,000 seats.
-
AGFirst Farm Credit Bank, the premier agricultural lender in the eastern United States and Puerto Rico, is deploying 1,500 seats of Microsoft CRM.
-
Chiesi Farmaceutici SpA, an Italian multinational pharmaceutical company, is deploying 500 seats of Microsoft CRM.
-
Maccabi Healthcare Services, Israel’s fastest-growing health maintenance organization, now has 1,200 seats of Microsoft CRM.
Microsoft Business Solutions’ customer relationship management solution provides a complete suite of powerful marketing, sales and service capabilities, all with a familiar and consistent user experience based on Microsoft Office and Microsoft Office Outlook®. Microsoft CRM is offered in 22 languages around the world, with on-site and hosted CRM solutions being delivered through Microsoft’s global partner network.
Microsoft CRM has secured other multithousand-seat deals with large enterprises worldwide and across a wide range of product and service industries including pharmaceutical, the public sector, food and beverage, and telecom.
“The path to CRM success in large enterprises has been blocked by poor user adoption and spiraling deployment costs,” said Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Microsoft Business Solutions. “Microsoft CRM is delivering a radically better CRM value proposition for large businesses: an outstanding user experience delivered right through the desktop applications that people use every day, and a fast, flexible and easy-to-deploy platform based on common tools and industry standards.”
Partners See Momentum Building With Enterprise Customers
Microsoft partners are reporting that Microsoft CRM is being enthusiastically received in the enterprise. Momentum is strong with global systems integrators and computer telephony integrators, where Microsoft CRM’s scalability and ease of installation and customization are important differentiators.
“We can approach a large enterprise client with thousands of users and speak confidently about our ability to deploy a system that’s going to scale to their magnitude and deliver the kind of robust feature set that they need,” said Joy Baer, chief executive officer of Spot Buy Spot LLC, a Microsoft partner whose customers rank among the top 10 media and marketing companies in the U.S. “We’re engaged in a 1,000-user deployment now and are actively selling much larger deployments. Everyone already lives in Outlook, and the overall strength of the 3.0 release coupled with the seamless integration of the two products is proving very compelling to the enterprises we work with.”
Enterprises Across Many Industries Choose Microsoft CRM 3.0
Microsoft CRM is emerging as the solution of choice for enterprise-scale global companies in a wide range of verticals that are seeking a solution their employees can use to develop stronger and more profitable relationships. A broad feature set and tight integration with Office and Office Outlook are making Microsoft CRM the preferred technology in a number of industries. Examples include the following:
-
Food services. Quiznos, based in Denver, Colo., is celebrating its 25th year and has been ranked among the top franchises and fastest growing chains by leading business journals. The company has more than 4,700 restaurants in 24 countries.
“Quiznos successfully implemented Microsoft Dynamics CRM just over a year ago for approximately 550 users,” said Kristie Reid, IT project manager at Quiznos. “We are planning on upgrading to version 3.0 to take advantage of several new features, including the addition of entities along with advanced querying and exporting capabilities.”
-
Pharmaceuticals. Chiesi Farmaceutici is a European pharmaceutical company, headquartered in Parma, Italy, dedicated to the research, development and commercialization of ethical therapeutic products. Founded in 1935, the company employs over 2,500 people worldwide and has a Microsoft CRM deployment for its sales force.
“The success of CRM 3.O is related to a customer-centric vision,” said Emiliano Locatelli, sales director of Chiesi Farmaceutici. “We chose Microsoft CRM because we need software that helps us to better understand our customers’ potential and their needs, to offer the appropriate service and, above all, to focus our attention on our customers.”
-
Financial services. H&R Block is a diversified company with subsidiaries that deliver tax, financial, mortgage and business products and services. With headquarters in Kansas City, Mo., its subsidiaries offer a full range of software, online and in-office tax solutions, combined with personalized financial advice to help clients to build a better financial future.
H&R Block Financial Advisors Inc., a full-service securities broker, is a longtime Microsoft CRM customer, with 1,500 seats. The parent company has recently chosen Microsoft CRM as the basis of a new service offering.
“We’re launching a business line related to benefits screening and enrollment,” said John Thompson, assistant vice president of outreach and business development at H&R Block. “Our Financial Advisors unit already relies on Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and we liked it from the beginning for this new project. We’re starting out with a deployment of 500 seats, but we needed to build on a platform that will allow us to easily scale up to 6,000 seats as we roll out this new service. We thought, ‘OK, Microsoft is good at that.’”
“In developing this new H&R Block-branded service — a social services supply chain technology — we saw Microsoft Dynamics CRM as the ideal highly customizable framework to underlie all of the business processes,” said Marc Ferguson, president of Nets to Ladders, a Microsoft independent software vendor and H&R Block’s technology and business process development partner. “Microsoft CRM has exceeded all of our expectations. The performance improvements in the new release are quite remarkable. And the fact that this is Microsoft technology made a critical difference to H&R Block. They wanted to partner with a company they can count on for many years to come.”
About Microsoft Dynamics
Microsoft Dynamics is a line of financial, customer relationship and supply chain management solutions that helps businesses work more effectively. Delivered through a network of channel partners providing specialized services, these integrated, adaptable business management solutions work like and with familiar Microsoft software to streamline processes across an entire business.
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.
Microsoft, Microsoft Dynamics and Outlook are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries.
The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
Note to editors: If you are interested in viewing additional information on Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft Web page at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass on Microsoft’s corporate information pages. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may since have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/contactpr.mspx.
