Alex Barnett blog

Stuff

July 2007 - Posts

And of Dynamics Live CRM SaaS APIs?

Todd Bishop reported today of Microsoft's intended entrance next year into the B2B SaaS market with its announcement at the annual Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver, providing details on pricing and partner revenue-share plans for a hosted service version of Microsoft Dynamics Live CRM:

"Businesses use CRM programs to handle sales, service and other customer interactions. The new "Live" CRM option, to be offered by Microsoft as an online service, is part of its broader effort to expand beyond traditional software licensing into subscription- and advertising-based offerings.

...Microsoft announced plans for a subscription rate of $44 per user each month for the professional version of the new Microsoft Dynamics Live CRM, and $59 for the enterprise version.

Salesforce.com lists prices of $65 for the professional version of its Web-based customer relationship management service, and $125 for the enterprise version. List prices in the online CRM market are commonly in the ballpark of $70 to $100 per user each month, said Liz Herbert, a Forrester Research analyst. "

Phil Wainewright commented on the catching up Microsoft needs to do in this SaaS / CRM space (something I've commented on previously), hence the lower price-point when compared to Salesforce.

"Undercutting Salesforce.com is an obvious ploy for Microsoft to attempt with its CRM Live product, so the pricing it announced today shouldn’t come as any big surprise. Salesforce.com has always priced at the high end of what it could get away with, and it’s benefitted from five years of being allowed to get away with it, plowing the proceeds into an astonishing sales and marketing drive that’s blasted revenues past the half-billion dollar a year mark."

(screenshots here)

Although Microsoft will be offering Dynamics Live CRM at no charge during an early access beta starting this year, it is unlikely they will go "live" until the second half of 2008 (I'm speculating), presumably once the "Windows Live Data Centres" are ready to do so...a brand we are promised we'll hear a lot more of in the future.

Salesforce.com responded. In a phone call with Todd Bishop, VP of Corporate Strategy, Bruce Francis, took a typically aggressive tone (that is, typical of Salesforce.com, not Bruce) in reacting to the news:

"What it looks like is that Microsoft is just marking down an inferior product to what customers are actually paying right now. Also, one thing that I haven't seen is the url where I can sign up for a 30-day trial. ... I know a great multi-tenant on-demand service when I see one, and I see more of them every day. ... We could talk for hours about all the great on-demand services that are out there that I can sign up and use. Where is Microsoft? Microsoft has a price list, not a product."

But where is the news of Dynamics Live CRM web / SaaS APIs? No mention of these anywhere that I've seen, but if Microsoft wants to take on Salesforce.com they'll need a strong story here - the latter has a mature programmable surface today with a fairly healthy ecosystem of developers.

It's one thing to have on-premises software that can be extended and integrated with other software and services through SOAP APIs behind your firewall (Dynamics has a healthy story in this department today), but it is quite another (increasingly necessary) thing to provide APIs as part of a hosted SaaS service. I would have thought the provisioning of SaaS APIs would have been a central component of Microsoft's messaging today so am a little surprised by its omission.

Does Xbox 360 warranty cover Transformation?

Saw the new Tranformers movie with William yesterday. Outstanding CGI and takes product placement marketing to new limits. Which brings me to the following question: Is this covered by the newly extended Xbox 360 warranty?

 

 

Get Me to the Church on Time!

On Saturday Kate and I celebrated our ten year anniversary by renewing our vows in a Las Vegas “themed” wedding chapel. We were "re-married" by none other than the King himself. It felt strange getting married again and it felt even more bizarre to do so by a professional Elvis pastor (thankyouverymuch), but it was a lot of fun.

(Luckily it wasn't Windows Embedded powering the "best wishes" screen...)

Getting to Las Vegas

Getting to Las Vegas was different story and involved a complete farce facilitated by JetBlue.

The original plan was for us to meet Salt Lake City airport on Thursday evening where I would fly in from Boston and Kate from Seattle and then we would set off by car for Las Vegas first thing on Friday morning. Things started to go "pear shaped" early on Thursday when I heard that my 5pm Delta flight from Boston had been cancelled outright due to the poor weather over JFK.

Scrambling to find an alternative flight, I was able to book a JetBlue flight to SLC leaving at 7:10pm. When I arrived at the airport, I learned that flight was also cancelled and since there were so many other flights affected that day due to the major disruptions at JFK, all the Friday flights from Boston were sold out, including any in-direct routes I might take to SLC. To my despair, it looked like the earliest I could get to SLC was Saturday - the day I supposed to be getting re-married in Vegas.

Our only work-around was to meet in Vegas a day early instead. So we our changed our flights accordingly and booked an extra hotel room for that night. The new plan was for me to catch the last flight (JetBlue 8:00pm) from Boston to Vegas and Kate to change her flight from Seattle to Boston instead and then meet at the hotel in Vegas. The new plan meant we'd have to skip the planned road-trip south from SLC but we could still make the second road-trip up north to return to SLC - an acceptable downside given the circumstances.

JetBlue - fcuk you

While I was waiting to board, I heard over the speaker that my 8:00 plane was ready to go but we were waiting for our crew... they delayed from JFK. We were told that the crew was due to arrive at 8:10, so we should expect a 30 minute delay. At 8:30, were reminded why we were late (no crew) and should expect our crew to turn up "any minute now". At 9:00 I approached the desk to see if there was any news. To my horror, I found that the JFK flight that was meant to be carrying our crew hadn't yet left JFK. Now I was worried. The gate attendant tried to assure me and the other passengers who overheard our conversation that the JFK flight to Boston had not been cancelled and so our Vegas would go ahead (as far as he was concerned). I didn't believe him.

At 10:30pm, our crew finally turned up but sans a first officer. JetBlue didn't know where he was but announced that they were expecting him to turn up "any minute now".

An hour later and after plenty of irate customers had “shared their dissatisfaction” with the gate attendant, a replacement first officer turned up. Naturally, the atmosphere around the gate cheered up significantly. Then, just as we were ready to board, we saw the replacement first officer briskly exit the plane and head of down the terminal. As she did so, the gate attendant announced (whose credibility amongst the passengers had been eroded to less than zero by this point) that they had located the original first officer and we would be ready to board… "any minute now". That was at 11:30pm.

JetBlue had continued to stress during this entire shambles that if the flight was cancelled due to “reasons outside their control” that the passengers would not be entitled to a refund and that they would not be compensated for a hotel room / meal for their overnight stay. Passengers could however “re-book a new JetBlue flight at no cost”. But it wasn’t until I forcefully pointed out that at one point JetBlue had a full crew with the plane ready to go - and that JetBlue had made a decision to remove the replacement first officer because they believed the original first officer was able to join the flight, and therefore if the flight was to be cancelled that it had been cancelled so because of reasons within their control and that JetBlue would therefore be liable for refunds and hotels/meals. They didn’t have a choice but to agree with me on this.

After another 30 minutes (now 12:00am) and with customers now demanding the truth of the situation, the gate attendant announced that the original first officer would in fact be arriving from his flight at 1:00am and therefore our flight was due to leave at 1:20am, five hours later than originally advertised. No-one believed him and everyone was convinced that the flight would eventually be cancelled. A number of passengers (including me) were now looking for alternative options to get to Vegas that day (now Friday). However, astonishingly, the flight was not cancelled and we did eventually leave at this new time. They also announced that they would be refunding the full cost of the flight even though the flight would not be cancelled.

I finally arrived in Vegas at 5:00am and feeling very lucky to have done so. I was tired and irritated but I would “get to the church on time”.

What was so frustrating with the whole JetBlue episode is not so much that the flight was delayed (it happens) or that it was five hours delayed (extreme, but it happens) but that the communication by JetBlue throughout the process was so excruciatingly poorly managed, unprofessional and at times simply downright dishonest. Not flying JetBlue again if I can help it.

-

To finish off on a positive note, Vegas was great - it was Kate's first time there and we had a ball. The drive back was fun.

Here's to the next ten years!!!

Posted: Jul 04 2007, 10:27 AM by alexbarnett | with no comments
Filed under: ,
Astoria podcast - Jon Udell interviews Pablo Castro

Here's something I've been looking forward to for a while - Jon Udell interviewing Pablo Castro on the topic of Astoria.

After the interview Jon wrote:

"I’m not even close to being an expert in the underlying data access technologies, including ADO.NET, the Entity Data Model, and LINQ, so parts of the discussion quite frankly went over my head. Nor am I yet familiar with the tooling that’s required to wrap this kind of services layer around a plain data source. But I’m 100% clear that it’s a good idea, and a great example of RESTful web services — a book that Pablo Castro says is “required reading” for members of the Astoria team."

If you like the sound of Astoria keep an eye on Pablo's blog.

More Posts « Previous page