Can you tell us about your announcement of the shipment of CRM 3.0? We had said we'd finish sometime in the first quarter of 2006. Now, we're releasing in early December worldwide. We finished coding back in May, and we just finished testing and everything else this week on Monday. Things went as expected.
You went from CRM 1.2 to 3.0. Why the skip? We had initially planned to release 2.0 in the spring of this year, but the partners and customers said, "This is a good release, but it really could be a game-changing release if you went back and did some additional work." We decided to put some more time in the development cycle, rescoped it and added some customer-platform flexibility to make it easier to develop highly customized and vertical applications around CRM.
For instance? [3.0] has the ability to add new objects with no coding, and it's fully upgradable and portable. If you want a property management application that can create apartment and community objects with no coding, this will automatically generate the underlying data and the screen and all the Web services for it, and you can use it in a workflow and in reporting.
How did you accomplish this? Microsoft CRM is a very modern application, built in the last four to five years with a Web services architecture. You can automatically generate a new object and make that object live and work in the system. Before, it would have required a lot more coding to create customer objects. Our partners have told us in Version 3.0 they'll be able to develop vertical applications in a quarter of the time they could in the prior release.
How are you doing in the market? We grew 100 percent last year, and we're foreseeing a very fast rate of growth going forward. We have five and a half thousand customers now, with 150,000 [end] users.
When it comes to the hosted CRM market, Oracle has bought out Siebel Systems and will sell the Siebel OnDemand offering. You also compete against Salesforce.com. What does this mean? It's not really affecting us. For hosting, with 3.0 we're bringing in a new subscription-based pricing scheme, as we said in July, through a partner network. Previously, somebody had to buy the license -- either the partner or customer. Now, no one has to buy the license upfront. The [customer] gets the service through the partner, and they pay for as much as they want to use.
In terms of strategy, who are you selling to? There's a tremendous opportunity for Microsoft CRM, especially with the consolidation in the market causing companies to rethink CRM. We are selling from the smallest to the largest, bar none. For small businesses, we're releasing a small business edition prepackaged for the Small Business Server. Our professional edition can fit with small businesses that have more complexity, as well as midsize and enterprise-size companies. Every company in the world is a good candidate.
What about integration with Outlook and your business applications, such as Great Plains? We're going way beyond Outlook integration. We're offering a native Outlook experience, and many people will have no idea where Outlook stops and CRM starts. Expect us to integrate closely all the [business] applications over time.