Paul, the author of CRM at the Speed of Light, president of the 56 Group LLC and longtime contributor not just to SearchCRM.com but CRM outlets around the globe has an interesting idea — CRM Idol.

Essentially it is a contest for some of the less-known vendors with CRM-related product talent to get some exposure. Paul lays out all the details for entry and inclusion in his blog.    

There will actually be two separate contests, one for the Americas and one for EMEA. Judges will winnow 40 entrants down to four finalists based on one-hour demos. SearchCRM.com, as well as other media outlets, will publish the reviews of all the entrants.

Additionally, the four finalists will each create a 10-minute video that another group of judges as well as the public at large can vote on, thus the American Idol tie-in. We’ll post those videos here where people can vote.

 So, why should you as a buyer of CRM software or a practitioner care?

Well, there are a lot of small CRM or particularly niche vendors out there that you may not even know about. SearchCRM.com tends not to provide a lot of coverage on them, because without a large customer base or well-known brand, our readers don’t tend to have a lot of interest in them. However, just like that Texas waitress with a great set of pipes, there are some that are capable of very interesting things, yet toiling in obscurity.

Additionally, the contest offers not just exposure for technology providers, but a chance to learn about a new technology talent and have it vetted by some industry experts (and don’t worry, Paula Abdul isn’t a panelist here, either). There may be a solution to a problem you didn’t know you had, or a clever answer to one of your most vexing CRM problems.

Those interested in entering should contact Paul through his blog and those looking forward to the contest should stay tuned here. It may not have the flashing lights, live band and artificial drama of American Idol show (and I’m certainly no Seacrest) – but we’re hoping to give some exposure to emerging ideas and lesser-known CRM talent.

UPDATE: Paul has “officially” launched the event. An updated list of the criteria, judges, prizes and background for CRM Idol is all available at his blog and a Twitter hashtag has been established at #crmidol.

All Salesforce.com customers who switch from Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online between now and June 30, 2011 are eligible for a rebate of up to $200 per user that makes the switch. A minimum of 15 and a maximum of 250 are required.

“We will write a check to the customer to pay for the services required to do the transition,” said Michael Park, corporate vice president sales, marketing and operations at Microsoft. “As we’re gearing up for the [launch [of Dynamics CRM Online] we have a lot of customers transitioning off of Salesforce. We thought this would be a great way to build some momentum.”

The offer is also good for customers of Oracle’s CRM On Demand product. The $200 figure represents what Microsoft and its partners feel is appropriate for migrating data out of Salesforce.com and into Microsoft.

Such promotions are hardly uncommon. NetSuite’s cash for clunkers, which promised $500 to $1,500 in services for customers who switched from on-premise software to NetSuite, was one creative program recently. It helps to bring a little attention to the competition, though how effective these programs really are in convincing customers to make complicated software purchasing decisions is questionable.

Price is an important factor in CRM buying decisions as we’ve reported recently on SearchCRM.com, but it’s certainly not the only factor. According to Park, there are other reasons customers are moving to Microsoft from Salesforce.com, citing Salesforce.com’s static reporting capabilities and poor integration with Outlook – and Microsoft’s upper hand with the Office suite integration and flexibility. In fact, in an open letter to Salesforce.com customers, he suggests they ask the company those issues.

Setting aside the posturing and questionable effectiveness of any rebate program, the move does indicate that Microsoft’s target as it enters the CRM market is Salesforce.com. Similar to the way Salesforce.com took on Siebel Systems when it entered the market, any competition is likely to be good for customers and that’s the real news. As Park said:

“I think Salesforce has been uncontested for a while without us being out there aggressively to counter some of the claims they’re making.”

Fusion Applications will be generally available in the first quarter of 2011 and while it’s unlikely that customers will be flocking to deploy this software the minute it becomes available, it has been a long wait for Siebel, PeopleSoft CRM and even Oracle CRM customers.

Here are a couple screenshots of what the CRM applications will look like:

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

Additionally, I caught up with Chris Leone, vice president of applications development at Oracle, who ran through a couple of demos for me. The second shows a couple of CRM scenarios which might prove of interest.

 [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/XJKLSwB_z-c" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

(Editor’s note: In an effort to match the video with the application, we captured only a portion of the full screen)

More to come.

Michael Park

Microsoft made the beta release of its SaaS-based CRM product available yesterday and continued to target Salesforce.com as it did.

Michael Park, corporate vice president of Microsoft Business Solutions, came in to the SearchCRM.com offices to discuss Microsoft’s plans for Dynamics CRM Online. The beta version is available now and Park is hoping for “as many beta users as we can handle.”

We’ve outlined what’s in store for CRM Online and its on-premise partner CRM 2011 before, but Park also made clear that Microsoft has its eyes set on Salesforce.com when it comes to CRM. Not that this is the first time. Microsoft has already targeted Salesforce.com with a free CRM promotion.

“Last year Salesforce had 500,000 seat adds and Microsoft had 440,000.  With the advent of CRM Online we can catch or exceed the seat adds Salesforce.com is adding to the market, which is how we measure leadership,” Park said, adding, “the fact that we’ve driven a lot of SharePoint integration into this release is a value paradigm that Salesforce can’t hit.”

It’s an interesting point considering Salesforce.com has targeted SharePoint with its Chatter collaboration tool. It sets up an interesting rivalry for the direction of CRM software and how it intersects with collaboration tools in the cloud.

Additionally, Microsoft is also clearly taking aim at Salesforce.com’s AppExchange with its own online application exchange site, Marketplace, which is also in beta.

“Our technological advances in infrastructure allow our partners to put their IP into the marketplace in a secure way,” Park said. “Others, it’s literally a catalogue to shim in a url, but you still need to transact with that vendor.”

Microsoft is counting on its partner network to differentiate itself from Salesforce.com, and Park said the company would be recruiting heavily against Salesforce and Oracle’s CRM On Demand partners. Microsoft revamped its partner certification program for Marketplace and gold certified partners now have to provide vertical expertise.

“What makes an exchange is the power of the partner network,” he said. “We have 10,000 certified partners in Dynamics today.”

But while Salesforce is committed to multiple devices with its mobile capabilities, recently announcing support for Chatter on the BlackBerry and iPhone, Microsoft remains focused on preparing for Windows Mobile 7 before turning to RIM, Android or Apple devices.

“The main bet now is how do we drive value to the Microsoft portfolio,” Park said. “But there’s a lot of consideration going on about [iPhone, BlackBerry and Droid].”

In fact, Park specifically cited Stephen Elop, head of the Business Division which includes Dynamics CRM, Dynamics ERP and the Office product lines, as leading that effort. Except later in the day, Elop took the top job at mobile device maker Nokia.

We’ll see how that shakes out.

While “attracting and retaining new customers” comes in at #5 of the top 10 business priorities, CRM software doesn’t even make the list of technology priorities. Last year, it came in (along with other enterprise applications) at #2.

Yet, according to the more than 1,500 CIOs that took the survey, the business priorities typically associated with CRM still rank highly, including attracting and retaining new customers (#5), targeting customers and markets more effectively (#8) and expanding current customer relationships (#10). So why the lack of interest in CRM technology?

A couple of theories are floating around out there. Bob Apollo on CustomerThink suggests it’s a shift in what companies IT-enable. He writes.

We need to stop thinking about automating often badly-aligned “sales” and “marketing” processes and seize the opportunity to facilitate our prospect’s buying processes and embrace the dramatic changes that the net and web 2.0 have already made to buyer behaviour.

Meanwhile, Michael Maoz, a Gartner analyst focused on CRM, partly blames the hype around social networks:

But today the media and the hanger-on writers are all abuzz about “Social” and so our CIO community rushes in, at the risk of leaving behind the core of what they are out to do in the first place: build better systems to meet customer needs and demands. That is still CRM, the business process and strategy, wrapped in new clothing.

Rather than being less interested, Maoz, argues CIOs are smarter about CRM now. They know it’s not just about the technology.

And even so Gartner’s Top 10 technology priorities, contains plenty of intersection with CRM: Cloud Computing at #2, as really CRM software was at the forefront of the SaaS movement and remains there; Web 2.0 (check the Twitter stream for #SCRM if you don’t think so) and even Business Intelligence (#5) and Mobile Technologies (#6).

Maybe the premise is off in the first place. We shouldn’t be talking about CRM anymore at all. AMR long ago shifted to the term customer management and Forrester’s Bill Band has begun writing about the extended CRM application ecosystem.

Call it what you will, but it seems to me the market and the need for technology (and processes) to better connect with, and serve, your customers is alive and well.

While consolidation has been a major factor in the market for CRM software for large enterprises, start-ups are cropping up all the time to serve the SMB sector.  SearchCRM.com sat down with Brent Leary, co-founder and partner of CRM Essentials LLC, a CRM consultancy and advisory firm focused on small and mid-sized enterprises that provides training and best practices for implementing CRM software and CRM programs.

In this 15-minute podcast, Leary discusses:

• The current state of adoption of CRM software among SMBs
• Best practices for SMBs deploying CRM software
• What SMBs have learned about CRM failure from their enterprise counterparts
• The effects Web 2,0 and social networking are having on managing customer relationships and how SMBs can and are taking advantage of it

Abbo also shares his thoughts on the emergence of hosted call centers and where innovation will come from in the CRM market.

In this podcast he discusses the future of customer self-service technology, its evolution from a tactical to a strategic imperative and how vendors in the self-service market are innovating. He also shares his take on highly customized “microsites” that allow companies to create personalized pages for customer e-service and the growing importance of “click-to-call” customer service technology.

He has been researching CRM for the past seven years at Gartner and focuses particularly on CRM strategy and vision.