Microsoft has been pushing to get out its Dynamics CRM Online product for a while and, now that it’s out, seems to be taking a breath. The focus at Convergence was instead mostly around the update to Dynamics AX and, to a much lesser extent, its plans for ERP in the cloud. Details of its cloud strategy were few, in fact, my colleague Barb Darrow revealed more about what Microsoft had up its sleeve in her scoop before the show than anyone from Redmond bothered to share with the press and analysts who attended.

That’s not to say CRM news was entirely absent from the show. Microsoft has been targeting Salesforce.com with its CRM marketing for years. Yet, more than one executive told me that the company has been replacing Siebel as the CRM system of choice for customers.

“I had five meetings today and all five were replacing Siebel with Dynamics CRM,” Bill Patterson, group product manager for Microsoft Dynamics, said. “The average was 15,000 users.”

This is happening at the same time that Oracle is making its Fusion Applications available. While existing Siebel customers can stay on the platform for a while, they’ll eventually have to decide whether to move to Fusion Apps — or not.

 This section from Mark Fontechio’s story on SearchOracle.com makes the future of Siebel pretty clear. 

Concerns about how long those roadmaps will last for existing applications are valid. A Gartner report in November on Oracle Siebel CRM said that innovation “will likely be focused on Oracle Fusion Applications, rather than Siebel.” 

“The decision time on whether to migrate to Oracle Fusion Applications for CRM is not infinite, but it is elongated until after 2013,” the report reads. “We estimate that the last major release of Oracle Siebel CRM could be as late as 2013, and would have full support for five years, with Oracle Sustaining Support provided after that.”

 Debra Lilley, chairman of the UK Oracle User Group, points out some financial considerations for Oracle customers deciding whether to upgrade their existing Oracle applications or wait for Fusion. She’s writing about customers running versions of the Oracle E-Business Suite prior to R12, but Siebel customers will have to face some similar choices. She writes:

Oracle announced lifetime support back in 2006 and offered you an additional 3 years Extended Support for a premium. For an additional 10% . First point that is 10% of your support fee, not 10% of licence fee as some believe. However 2 years ago at Collaborate Oracle announced they would waive that uplift for the first year. We are well into that year now, with the 2nd year starting in December. For some people that is a substantial amount of money to pay, but upgrading isn’t cheap either.

But what was being articulated by some here, was that when Charles Phillips announced Lifetime support, he said that Fusion would be available before the end of Premium support and people could decide to upgrade or go straight to Fusion.

In other words, he said, here is your menu, but before dessert I will give you new options. The waiter is now pressuring then into accepting the original menu and the new menu won’t be available until after coffee.

Moving off of an ERP system is a huge decision and I wouldn’t expect an exodus from EBS because of frustration over support and the long wait for Fusion. However, a CRM migration is a different story. Siebel, after all, was once the clear leader in the market and there are still a lot of customers out there.

As Oracle attempts to move its customers from Siebel to Fusion Apps, Microsoft seems eager to establish itself as the alternative.

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.

I plan to be there tomorrow at Benioff’s session to see if he plays the polite guest (my guess is he will), but in the meantime, there were a few interesting tidbits from some successful CRM deployments at a customer panel.

These are not necessarily Oracle-specific but some practices I hadn’t seen before and worth noting here.

ANZ, an Australian financial services firm, extended and upgraded a small Siebel 7.8 deployment to Siebel 8.0 across the organization. A new CEO wanted to make the company more customer-centric and pushed for the new system. Getting executive buy in is a well-known imperative for a successful CRM project. So is ensuring user adoption, which ANZ did by involving users throughout the project.

“The native Siebel 7.8 UI is really devoted to call center users and not everyone’s cup of tea,” Christian Ventner, head of sales and services for the bank, noted.

But, beyond that as part of the project, ANZ included an “I know the customer” program. To provide a greater customer experience, ANZ included a large “What the customer wants” button as part of the UI. So, right away an employee notes why the customer is there, be it for investment advice or a question about an account. It can be adjusted by role (for example, a teller may not be able to offer investment advice) and quite clearly ensures the customer is getting the right person and the right information.

US Foodservice tests the application in a live environment

US Foodservice went beyond just including users in its design; it had them test out multiple products in a live environment. The company was transitioning from a niche CRM application that hadn’t met its needs to Oracle CRM On Demand. It narrowed down its list of finalists to three and then took the applications to its sales reps.

“We decided to go to the divisions with [reps] and let them work with it,” said Bridget Warns, senior director of US Foodservice. “In real time, we were configuring this application based on their feedback. The investment they had was key in our success of rolling it out.”

Three clicks or less for Scottish Widows

Similarly, Scottish Widows, a UK-based life pension and investment company, was choosing between Oracle On Demand and Salesforce.com and tried both in a live environment for two months with its sales force, swapping out one for the other.

“From that we were really able to build our business case and get backing from our director that it was the right thing to do,” Stephen Miller sales operations manager for Scottish Widows, said. “We rolled it out to 300 people at 14 sites in two months.”

Additionally, it made sure to make the application easily navigable.

“We wanted to ensure we met key design principles,” Miller said. “In any application there was a max of three clicks to get to any information.”

Nothing grabs attention in this market like tales of CRM failure, but these are a few tactics that led to success.