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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

Top 5 cloud computing trends for 2018

Bobby Varghese

Cloud adoption has enabled small enterprises and startups to go on a progressive journey to success instead of rushing aggressively to outrun their competitors. CIO’s are now turning their attention to how the use of technology can help them accomplish their business objectives in 2018.

 

With 2017 coming to an end, we have listed The Top 5 Trends in cloud computing that you should be aware of before you dive into 2018:

 

1. Rapid growth in cloud services solutions

 

Business and consumers had access to try early cloud service because (Saas) Software as a Service was flexible, reliable and financially attractive. Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service have also witnessed an exponential growth which expanded the number of cloud solutions available in the public and private sectors. The simplicity and the optimal performance offered by the cloud will see many more organizations take advantage of cloud computing in 2018

As per the Cisco Global Cloud Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2015–2020

All the services and solution would be used worldwide to achieve a variety of goals. 2018 will see SaaS as the most common and highly deployed cloud service across the globe. 60% of the cloud-based workloads will be SaaS as per the Cisco forecast, a 12% increase over 2017 prediction. IaaS and PaaS are also expected to increase.  Businesses that want to simplify operations and make it easier for their customers to access services will move more aggressively toward integrating SaaS, IaaS, and/or PaaS into their business processes.

 

2. Bigger cloud storage capacity

 

With Cloud Storage becoming a critical part of doing business, the data storage limit is expected to grow ascending in 2018. As a result, more data centers online with larger capacity storage equipment will be brought by different service providers. The Cisco survey estimates that in 2018, estimated total global storage capacity would be 1.1 ZB, which is approximately twice the space available in 2017.

 

3. 2018 is Internet Of Everything(IoE)

Innovators like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking commented on AI and IoT’s near-term potential and how they played a meritorious role in the tech community. While industry experts anticipate IoT will see its own growth, continuous innovations in real-time data analytics and cloud computing are set to push the internet of everything (IoE) to the fore in 2018. For humans, this will allow us to interact intelligently with every device in a network. Human-to-human communication will also be easier. For e.g: Google’s Pixel Buds(which are expected to be released in late 2017) are a headset equipped with the ability to recognize and translate 40 languages in real-time for its user. IoE will also provide businesses with more insight into how consumers relate to their products or services, customer care units, and one another.

 

4. The rise of 5G

A report drafted by Ericsson on 5G Readiness shows that many operators have accelerated preparations for the new technology, and trials are being carried out by 78 percent of the respondents.

Furthermore, 28 percent of the respondents expect to deploy 5G next year

With the fast internet and superior network quality, customer expectation would be massive. Fast-loading, highly responsive services, and apps would be just minimum expectations. Savvy business owners will evaluate the situation upfront and upgrade their SaaS, PaaS, and website platforms to be more responsive.

 

5. Cloud Security

2017 – Year of more cyber attacks than any other in history

Attacks such as the WannaCry ransomware, the CIA Vault 7 hack, and the Equifax data breach are reminders that cyber attacks are a reality of the 21st century.

We expect 2018 will see more individual and state-sponsored attacks aimed at undermining the security of cloud infrastructures. As cyber attackers become more sophisticated, security analysts in government, public, and private sectors will also have to become more sophisticated and timely in their methods for detecting and preventing attacks. Businesses will recognize the necessity of investing in tools like security information and event management (SIEM) and malware detection systems as fundamental defense mechanisms for cybersecurity.

2018, as expected would witness more individual and state-sponsored attacks targeting cloud infrastructures. Business will recognize the necessity of investing in tools like UEM(Unified EndPoint Management), SIEM(Security Information and Event management) and malware detection systems as fundamental defense mechanisms for cybersecurity.

What do you think would be 2018 cloud computing trends? Let us know in the comments below.

Sysfore, Microsoft Gold partner, uses leading network, technology, and service expertise to deliver our service anytime, virtually anywhere, quickly and efficiently. Contact one of our experts today and we will help you find the perfect solution for your business. Write to us at info@sysfore.com or give us a call at +91 (80) 4110 5555.

 

Resizing your Cloud Instance – When is the right time?

Bobby Varghese

Microsoft offers numerous options to choose from when it comes to selecting the best Azure compute instance for your workloads. Like we mentioned in our previous post about Azure Compute Instances, Microsoft offers 80 different instance types to their customers to choose from according to their workload sizes.

You can view the detailed specifications of various Azure Instances here.

We understand that it becomes overwhelming to pick the right Cloud instance to match the specific workload. But with the ever-changing workloads, enterprises need to continuously review and update their instances to match the delivery times and reduce costs.

Below are some signs which indicate that your current instance size is infeasible to run the application and that you should probably resize your Cloud Instance:

  • Long runtimes to complete a task,
  • Inability to meet customer demands on time, and
  • Need for more instances to support the workload.

In order to understand which compute instance to choose for their workload, admins should first learn about their computing requirements by running their applications in local environments and monitoring the performance to detect possible bottlenecks. On the basis of outcomes, they can decide on the number of processor cores, storage, memory, network bandwidth, etc., and can choose the instance that meets, and slightly exceeds, the estimated requirements.

But due to various limitations in the number of available virtual disks in certain instances, some applications still fail to run which force an admin to select a larger instance. Tools like Azure Diagnostics will help to measure the performance of an application within the instance. Admins can select that instance if their key metrics are met otherwise, they can try moving their workload in another instance.

 

If you are baffled by the number of options and are unsure about when to resize your Cloud Instance, get in touch with our Cloud experts by writing to us at info@sysfore.com. You can also give us a call at +91-80-4110-5555 and we’ll be happy to help.