Microsoft Delays Its CRM System Again
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Microsoft officials acknowledged Thursday that the company has decided to postpone by several months the final release-to-manufacturing (RTM) date for its next major customer-relationship-management application. The product, code-named "Microsoft CRM 2.0," originally was set to ship in 2004. Last year, Microsoft said it was delaying the CRM 2.0 release until the early part of 2005. Just a few weeks ago, company officials said the 2.0 release would be released to manufacturing in March, 2005. But on Thursday, Microsoft pushed back the RTM date to some time in the fourth calendar quarter of 2005. If the product RTMs late in the year, customers will be unlikely to see the final bits until early 2006. According to Brad Wilson, the general manager of Microsoft's CRM product management team, Microsoft gave partners and customers a choice of shipping the product in March, as planned, or delaying its delivery in order to add new features. Among the features customers and partners requested were: At the request of customers and partners, Microsoft also is expanding the geographic availability of the 2.0 release, adding localized support for Japanese, Chinese, Norwegian, Finnish and Iberian Portuguese languages. Wilson declined to comment on how the latest Microsoft CRM delay will affect the CRM roadmap that Microsoft laid out a year ago. According to that roadmap, Microsoft expected to release another major version of its CRM offering, dubbed Microsoft CRM 3.0, some time during its fiscal 2006 year, which runs from July 1, 2005, to June 30, 2006. Microsoft says it has nearly 3,500 Microsoft CRM customers. |
