SAP and Microsoft are expanding their hosted application partner networks, with Microsoft growing outside the US while SAP expands in the US.

At Microsoft's European Convergence conference, it announced several new international partners who will serve up hosted versions of the forthcoming Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 release, plus their own extensions.

The all-new CRM 4.0 (formerly known as Titan), which is due for release later this year, will be based on modern .NET architecture, plus multi-tenancy. The same code base will be used for on-premise and hosted implementations.

Microsoft is also slashing the fees it charges partners who offer hosted CRM services, from $25 per user per month to $15, which represents a 40% drop. The reduced price offers partners more scope when packaging the base CRM application with their own extensions because they can potentially offer both CRM plus extended services (back-office, vertical, or regional-specific extension) for the same price as other providers offer CRM-only services. It also helps Microsoft up the ante in the nascent SaaS application pricing/functionality war against players including Salesforce.com, NetSuite, and now SAP. Few players offer just CRM as a service.

The manual to run the toaster would be approximately 10,000 pages long. The toaster would come with 2,500 switches which would all have to be set in an exact pattern and in a precise sequence in order to toast specific kinds of bread. Each pattern would be established by SAP's experts as the Best Practices method of toasting that kind of bread. It would take a team of basis and functional contractors about 1 year to configure the toaster in the best manner, and then another 6 months to test it. In the mean time, your entire family would need to attend extensive training classes on how to use the new toaster. In order to support end users and consultants, MIT would establish a list-serv for people to post questions and answers regarding toaster set-up and operation. Of course, the online help would randomly pop up in German. But once it was running, you'd get the best toast in the world.

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