According to a Forrester Wave report, Microsoft Dynamics CRM is ahead of the competition in customer relationship management (CRM) for mid and large sized organisations.

Microsoft says its Dynamics CRM solution came out on top due to flexibility, usability and price. The report evaluated 19 other CRM suite solutions (including those of Salesforce, Oracle and SAP) against 516 criteria that reflected the needs of mid to large sized organisations.

“It is an honour to be recognised as a Leader in the CRM industry that is helping customers seize new opportunities and grow their businesses,” said Stewart Gibbs, Manager, Microsoft Dynamics for Microsoft New Zealand.  “We deliver innovation and value to companies around the world and in New Zealand through our focus on end-user productivity, business process flexibility and agility, and the ability of our customers to leverage public and private cloud deployment models.”

The report also suggests that companies are beginning to invest again in their CRM capabilities, something Microsoft says was overlooked during the economic downturn.

Stewart says companies are increasingly seeing the benefits of CRM systems.

“Over the past five years 450 companies have purchased Microsoft Dynamics in New Zealand with the rate of adoption steadily increasing every year, and despite the recent global economic woes Microsoft Dynamics CRM has grown in excess of 70% year-over-year and we expect this to keep growing significantly in the future as companies realise the need to stay closer to customers and reap the benefits of our CRM platform and the cloud.”

Microsoft Dynamics CRM version 5.0 will be launched later this year as both an on-premise and online offering.