cloud technology

Dynamics 365 VS Salesforce: What suits your business

Bobby Varghese

A CRM solution allows enterprises to communicate in a better way with their customers and apprehend their predilection to serve more systematically and efficiently. Choosing the right CRM is unarguably a herculean task, with numerous companies entering the CRM software market at various price points.

Not all systems are the same, neither are they created equal. Today’s marketplace is filled with CRM system that allows enterprises to connect with their employees and customers in a more dynamic way.  Among many mega-vendors that account for a large market-share, this article compares two of the major players in the CRM market: Microsoft Dynamics 365 vs Salesforce.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Vs. Salesforce

While both the platforms have a significant user base and with each new update, they try to differentiate themselves in the CRM market, in this article, we list five well-defined differences that showcase how Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Salesforce measure up against each other:

  1. User Experience

The perfect combination of simple user interface and application utility is what Salesforce is famous for. A very well designed UI that is intuitive and customizable. Whereas Dynamics 365 UI delivers a modern user experience. It is quite adaptive to user preferences and expectations when it comes to modifying the stylesheets, tabs, themes, and typography.

  1. Service

Dynamics CRM over a period of time has acquired Parature, Adxstudio, and FieldOne, combining them into a single solution to offer assisted service, field service, self-service, and support for professional Dynamics CRM services. While Microsoft Dynamics has made customer service a point of differentiation, Salesforce offers excellent case management, knowledge management, and social service capabilities.

  1. Marketing

Salesforce allows the users to create and manage marketing campaigns and relationships with customers anytime, anywhere. It also delivers customer-specific services for email marketing and marketing automation. Microsoft Dynamics Marketing (MDM) on the other hand, gives users exceptional insights into customer data, enables automated multi-channel campaigns to drive tangible results, delivers more comprehensive customer engagement processes and offers unique value through Marketing Resource Management (MRM).

  1. Customer Support

Customer support is a little restricted on Salesforce, neither do they have a lot of options to choose from. They offer reasonable phone support based on different plans. Also, the number of Salesforce partners catering to small and mid-sized business is low.  But Microsoft Dynamics is a larger and more mature consultant network with several certified partners across the globe providing comprehensive solutions at competitive rates.

You can a take a free Dynamics 365 readiness assessment here.

  1. Business Intelligence

Salesforce Analytics Cloud leverages cloud and mobile technology to deliver more powerful and secure data, faster. Salesforce lacks data integration tools, though there are various 3rd party tools available. It further lacks extensibility and requires you to learn a proprietary language that can incur additional costs to rack up the monthly subscription.

However, Dynamics 365 integrates with Microsoft Power BI that facilitates agile data analysis through self-service business intelligence analytics managed in the cloud for collaboration and sharing.

Conclusion

Salesforce can be considered by enterprises who just want to keep their customer data in the cloud and allow the IT staff to focus on other projects. Whereas if you want to work with a familiar coding language and deploy the system on-premise, Dynamics 365 is the ideal choice. Over that Dynamics 365 offers better pricing and is widely used by innovative enterprises.

Contact Sysfore, Microsoft Dynamics 365 partner, today to learn how you can implement Dynamics 365 in your organization and find the perfect solution for your business. Write to us at info@sysfore.com or give us a call at +91 (80) 4110 5555

6 Top Advantages of Cloud CRM services for SMBs

Bobby Varghese

Implementing a Cloud CRM introduces many new ways of doing business. Moving the customer and project data to the Cloud brings multiple benefits that were not accessible with traditional, on-premises CRM solutions.

Before we move on to the advantages, let’s first understand exactly what a Cloud-based CRM means. A Cloud CRM System is any Customer Relationship Management technology where the CRM software, CRM tools, and the organization’s customer data reside in the cloud and are accessed by end-users via web-based tools or a web browser. It is a platform which offers the fastest and most competent way to put the customers at the center of everything a business does. It helps the businesses in sales, marketing, after sales support, community building, etc. In short, it manages your business’ single most important goal – satisfying your customers.

 

So, what are the advantages of Cloud-based CRM?

Easy Installation:

IT leaders feel that the installation process of Cloud-based CRM services is long and complex. It is, in fact, simple and the system can be up and running in no time. All it requires is an internet connection and can be used with a simple sign-in. It saves the costs incurred on hardware, servers and maintaining software. And, as the complex installations, data migrations, upgrades, etc. are done remotely, it also saves on the cost of hiring a permanent IT person on site.

Seamless Access:

One of the greatest advantages of a cloud-based CRM is round-the-clock accessibility. You can maintain a centralized database which can be accessed remotely by you or your colleagues at any time from any device. This helps in better collaboration and offers more flexibility and freedom to keep up with your customer needs on-the-go.

Affordable:

You can pay for Cloud-based CRM services as and when you use them.  This requires minimum upfront investment and reduces risk. Moreover, there are no hidden charges when it comes to buying additional hardware or license fees. All you have to pay is a set monthly fee for using the service. This makes Cloud-CRM the most preferable and optimal solution for small and medium sized enterprises.

Highly Secure:

Customer data security is one of the major reasons why most of the enterprises are wary of adopting a cloud solution. According to Forrester Research, about 51% of the firms don’t opt for a cloud solution only because of security concerns.

Cloud CRM service providers take the responsibility to protect your customers’ confidential information and therefore, take these security concerns very seriously. In fact, the information security levels offered by Cloud servicing companies are higher than any other on-premises server. They offer advanced backup policies and also have clear data recovery plans to fight data breaches.

Flexible:

Businesses with smaller customer base prefer to prefer to start with the limited features that can help them in the current work which is relevant to customer needs. However, as the customer base grows, the company might need more features and advanced modules in their CRM system. In this case, companies can get a bigger, better and more innovative CRM system which can be updated instantly without the need to write a new program.

Enhanced Compatibility:

Today’s IT world demands flexibility in integration and standalone products have little chances of success. Especially in a small business environment, information exchange between already available technologies is of utmost importance. Thus, compatibility with other programs is the key to ensure a CRM system’s longevity and effectiveness.

A Cloud CRM can be easily integrated with email clients, software, and other Microsoft office products making it an appropriate choice for small businesses.

 

The role of cloud-based CRM should be considered as a strategic business enabler. A good cloud CRM system will lead to enhanced customer satisfaction and improve the profitability of the business. And, the right partner can not only make cloud CRM happen for your business but can also fuel your competitive edge in the process.

Do you want to find out how cloud-based CRM can impact your business? Write to our experts at info@sysfore.com or give us a call at +91 (80) 4110 5555 and get free consultation to implement cloud based CRM for your business.

Cloud Implementation Strategy For Legacy Apps

Bobby Varghese

The last decade has witnessed a tremendous growth in Cloud Migration. Today, Cloud Computing has become one of the most disruptive phases in modern IT and an increasing number of enterprises are adopting the trend to realize cost and scale efficiencies. But, CIOs and other technology leaders face numerous challenges while developing a cloud implementation strategy for their organization in order to meet their business goals.

In this article, we will discuss a Cloud Implementation strategy for legacy applications focusing on the common benefits and challenges of these migration processes.

Assess Individual Application Requirements

Before moving a legacy application to the cloud, it is important to assess the requirements of individual applications taking users and organizational needs into consideration. As the migration process is largely invisible to the users, moving a client-server application to the cloud without assessing the outcomes carefully can lead to higher angst among users. This will affect the productivity and can put future application migrations at risk.

Consider the Application Architecture

Move your traditional applications to cloud only if you see an obvious benefit. Cloud offers operationalized economics, improved simplicity and instant scalability but simply moving a traditional client-server based ERP infrastructure to cloud – as a lift-and-shift operation – without taking appropriate connectivity decisions can have disastrous consequences for users. Most database applications handle network latency poorly and shifting just the server side of a client-server application to the cloud will often increase latency beyond tolerable levels. Also, these types of applications were designed with private data centers in mind and rebuilding so much surrounding infrastructure in the cloud can often negate the financial and simplicity benefits.

Decide a Migration Process

Moving your legacy apps can be done in two different ways:

  • Copying the VMs to cloud and restarting them at the provider: This yields the best outcomes when the speed of deployment is the main concern. But there may be some complexities due to the surrounding infrastructure as mentioned earlier.
  • Rebuilding the application environment from scratch: Legacy App migration is a good opportunity to clean up and ensure that the application operating environment adheres to the latest best practices. Thus, it makes sense to rebuild the application environment considering the organizational goals and budget.

Prioritize the Applications before Migrating

Before you migrate your applications to the cloud, decide the order in which you want to “make the move”. Generally, very few organizations can simply migrate all their applications at once. Thus, prioritization is critical. These suggestions will help you prioritize your applications effectively:

  1. Start with non-critical services: Starting with non-critical services will help your staff get an idea about the overall process and learn lessons that can be applied to move critical workloads. You will also learn about how your cloud service provider supports your workloads. This will help you make the required changes as you move your critical applications to the cloud.
  2. Migrate appropriate services to SaaS: For many companies these days, operating local collaboration environments isn’t effective. Moving to SaaS passes the responsibility of managing servers to the service providers and reduces costs by great extent. But, at the same time, many providers might not offer all the features which the companies are currently using. If your company is running a heavily customized environment, do a feature-by-feature analysis and decide if your company can survive after losing a particular feature. Otherwise, prefer to stay local.
    Likewise, cloud-based reporting services can be scaled to almost unlimited capacity and you won’t have to worry about scaling the local compute and storage resources. Thus, replacing your local data analysis services with cloud-based ones would prove helpful.
  3. Decide the applications that will stay local: Finally, account for those applications that need to stay local. It is important to keep the services like DNS, DHCP, and print servers for infrastructure support and one to two domain controllers for authentication purposes. Many companies prefer keeping the critical items local as a risk management strategy. However, this is starting to change with an increase in the robust and secure working environments.

One of the most critical parts of this migration process is choosing the right vendor to work with. It is important to ensure that your cloud vendor has the capabilities to manage and host your cloud enabled applications whilst helping you to control costs, SLAs and security that your business needs.

Sysfore offers your organization an abundance of cloud-relates skills and insights, covering all aspects of the transition to an environment in which legacy systems and cloud services co-exist. Write to our experts at info@sysfore.com or get in touch with us at +91 (80) 4110-5555 to get free consultation!