When you talk about partners, who are you talking about?
Wilson: All of our partners will be able to do hosting -- what we call our Service Provider License Agreement Program -- but our model is not to mimic somebody else's business model, it's to bring Microsoft's specific strengths into the market. Our ability to have a package that is very easy to customise, that leverages our big partner network.
So the aim is to make it CRM that every company can use?
Wilson: Yes, your front-desk assistant will have just a little bit of CRM to book appointments for people, and your head of sales operations will have a much broader and deeper view across the company.
Is Microsoft trying to address a specific weakness in the market with CRM 3.0?
Wilson: This is a very easy platform to customise. For example, if you want to create a vertical application for a city council, you can easily add new data objects, not found in a standard CRM database model, that reflect what councils have to do. You can rename existing system entities, and you can add new entities -- all without writing any code. It will automatically generate all the data stored, (and) all the screens you need, and it will automatically generate the Web services that you connect to on external systems.
That is a very big differentiator for us: deep verticalisation and deep customisation that you can do using standard technology.
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