Microsoft's Nadella Banks On LinkedIn Data To Challenge Salesforce (reuters.com)

Microsoft is rolling out upgrades to its sales software that integrates data from LinkedIn, an initiative that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told Reuters was central to the company's long-term strategy for building specialized business software. From the report: The improvements to Dynamics 365, as Microsoft's sales software is called, are a challenge to market leader Salesforce.com and represent the first major product initiative to spring from Microsoft's $26 billion acquisition of LinkedIn, the business-focused social network. The new features will comb through a salesperson's email, calendar and LinkedIn relationships to help gauge how warm their relationship is with a potential customer. The system will recommend ways to save an at-risk deal, like calling in a co-worker who is connected to the potential customer on LinkedIn. [...] The artificial intelligence, or AI, capabilities of the software would be central, Nadella said. "I want to be able to democratize AI so that any customer using these products is able to, in fact, take their own data and load it into AI for themselves," he said. On Monday, LinkedIn said it has surpassed 500 million members globally, one of the first big milestones for the business social network since its acquisition.

Comments

Why do people keep running from Dynamics?

[Chas]

Seriously.

My company deals with CRM platforms. And just about anybody who's ever had experience with Dynamics has pretty much run away from the platform, screaming.

And I can understand why.

When even MICROSOFT cannot recover a proper SQL backup out of their own data with regards to MULTIPLE versions of Dyanmics and SQL Server. you KNOW something's wrong. Hell, even a simple contact export seems beyond them.

And let's not even get into (lack of) usability or (dearth of) performance...