PDF Counting the Hidden Costs of Salesforce - ERP, CRM

 Hidden Costs

Counting the Hidden Costs of

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Organizations evaluating CRM solutions should be aware of the hidden costs of 's licensing structure. This document was created to 1) help organizations to understand the areas where hidden costs exist, 2) ask the right questions of the CRM vendors they have chosen to investigate, and 3) make informed CRM investment decisions. For organizations considering , common misconceptions or surprises include the following:

HYPER-PREMIUM PRICING. Professional Edition (list price USD $65/user/month) has a very limited set of functionality that meets few businesses' needs. As a result, upsells companies to its Enterprise Edition, which they state is their most popular edition at a list price USD $125/user/month. Surprisingly, even this version is incomplete. In contrast, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is a complete CRM solution and available for USD $44/user/month.

ADD-ON CHARGES. sells add-on functionality at an additional cost. Additional costs include items like mobile (USD $50/user/month), knowledge base (USD $50/user/month), offline access (USD $25/user/month), visual workflow, partner and community portals, and more. In contrast, many of these capabilities are included with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, or available at a lower additional cost.

EXORBITANT STORAGE COSTS. Organizations that need more storage capacity are subject to 's additional storage costs which can be as much as USD $250/gigabyte/month. In contrast, additional storage in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is $9.99/gigabyte/month.

MISSING FUNCTIONALITY. While has invested in numerous acquisitions to build its collaboration and Platform-as-a-Service products, relatively less investment has gone into its CRM product line. In contrast, Microsoft Dynamics CRM is recognized as a leader by leading analyst firms, and is committed to innovating its CRM products.

FRAGMENTED MOBILE SUPPORT. While claims to differentiate on its mobile capabilities, it has gaps in device support (e.g., Android, Windows Phone). Additionally, there is no continuity between the Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Chatter. In contrast, Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides options for organizations to obtain a consistent experience across devices for a reasonable cost.

The remainder of this whitepaper provides a cost comparison to Microsoft technologies, while providing detailed insight into 's hidden costs. Additionally, it provides specific guidance on what topics to discuss with prior to signing a contract. If you would like additional information, please visit our website at .

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Counting the Hidden Costs of

Contents

Pay More and Get Less with .......................................................................................................................... 3 User Productivity Costs ........................................................................................................................................................... 6 Deployment Costs ................................................................................................................................................................. 11 Application Support Costs..................................................................................................................................................... 13 How to Avoid 's Hidden Costs ...................................................................................................................... 15 Select Microsoft Dynamics CRM Customers ......................................................................................................................... 16

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Pay More and Get Less with

Cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) vendors such as have made it relatively easy to evaluate, compare, try, and subscribe to its CRM solutions. However, some customers have found that the projected versus actual costs of using increases their total cost of ownership far more than their published subscription fees.1 is missing critical functionality that you get with Microsoft products. Organizations that need to add additional features or third party products can find themselves paying unexpected, and significant, extra charges in terms of deployment, application support, and user productivity. This paper illustrates that offers a pay more, get less value proposition, and also provides insight into areas where functionality gaps may result in additional costs.

PAY MORE

a

List priceb: $113/user/month

c

! List price:

$659/user/month

! List price:

$699/user/month

a Estimates are based on a common arrangement for a 50-user deployment. Costs are in U.S. dollars. b Microsoft subscription costs include Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Microsoft Office 365, CWR Mobility, and 2 GB of additional storage. c Deployment costs in this chart exclude implementation and resource costs associated with configuration, customization, integration, development, and data migration.

As the preceding chart depicts, organizations should be aware of additional costs that might be required to deliver needed functionality and support through .

Many customers find out when it is too late--after a two or three year contract has already been signed-- that additional costs apply. For example, customers face a hidden cost to user productivity and subscription costs if important functionality such as workflow, beyond a simplistic version of it, is required. Despite its premium priced offerings2, often charges a premium for application support, application administration, and data archiving and restoration. Additional costs can also apply for things like CRM data migration, data de-duplication, Microsoft Outlook interoperability, mobile access, and offline usage.

1 See appendix, Customer Switchers: to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2 See 's pricing information

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For these reasons, organizations evaluating should understand the cost implications, and also understand alternatives like Microsoft Dynamics CRM business software--one of the leading CRM solutions in the industry.

GET LESS

To help illustrate where functionality limitations exist, consider the following comparisons of Microsoft and .

It is readily apparent that provides a subset of the functionality that Microsoft provides--but at a premium price. Each of the limitations represents a subset of the hidden costs that can creep up with . For organizations looking to leverage their existing Microsoft investments, Microsoft offers a more complete feature set. Additionally, many Microsoft Dynamics CRM capabilities are included and interoperable with Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft SharePoint Server, Windows Azure technology platform, Microsoft SQL Server database software, Microsoft Exchange Server, or other Microsoft technologies ? right out of the box. Organizations that select Microsoft Dynamics CRM can derive even more value from investments that it has already made in Microsoft products.

A BETTER OPTION AND VALUE

Contrary to the pay more, get less approach is a better value proposition from Microsoft. For example, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online provides predictable pay-as-you-go pricing and a financially backed service level agreement (SLA). Flexibility, reliability, security, and simplicity are often considered important characteristics by organizations who evaluate CRM solutions. Microsoft delivers tremendous value when assessing these characteristics along with delivering lower user productivity, deployment, and application support costs. This is one reason that Microsoft Dynamics CRM is regarded as a leader in the CRM industry3 by top technology analysts. Success. Microsoft Dynamics CRM has delivered successful sales, service, and marketing solutions to more than 30,000 customers and 2 million users worldwide, from the largest organizations in the world to the smallest. For more information on some organizations that switched from and realized success on Microsoft Dynamics CRM, see the appendix section entitled, Customer Switchers: to Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

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Flexibility. With the power of choice in deployment, you can implement in the cloud, on-premises, or have your solution privately hosted by one of our partners. Additionally, Microsoft Dynamics CRM is built on the xRM Application Framework, a declarative modeling application that lets power users modify and even create new applications in a point-and-click manner. And because Microsoft Dynamics CRM is built on .NET, it is easy and cost-effective for organizations to leverage their existing Microsoft investments to adapt Microsoft Dynamics to specific needs and processes, as needed.

Interested in comparing costs?

Check out the cost comparison calculator at .

Reliability. In addition to a financially-backed 99.9 percent uptime SLA, Microsoft offers several global data centers that are managed and operated directly by Microsoft. Also, each Microsoft data center offers best-inclass security and in-region disaster recovery.

Security. Unlike , there is no co-mingling of customer data in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. Customers are provisioned with their own customer database to maximize the security and integrity of their data.

Simplicity. The Microsoft Outlook experience and easeof-use is only one reason that sets Microsoft apart from . Additionally, with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, you are able to scale the number of users up or down, based on your business requirements.

The remainder of this document explores a range of hidden costs associated with across a variety of dimensions including deployment costs, application support costs, and user productivity costs.

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