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Intermediate/ Digest...
Dynamics Marketing marks a formal entry into a market where Microsoft previously had no presence and is now doing so on a broad front. At Convergence, Microsoft demonstrated not only the revamped MRM functionality it inherited from MarketingPilot, along with the "Social Listening" capabilities it acquired from NetBreeze, but also many brand new marketing automation features, primarily around email and social campaigns, with mention of landing page/ web triggers being available in these campaign workflows.
But it is not this breadth of technological approach that is the most significant thing. That Microsoft sees Dynamics Marketing as suitable for all and scalable for its largest customers is an approach that might be familiar to those who recall its entry into the ECM market in 2001 with SharePoint. Not many people outside of Microsoft would consider SharePoint — even in 2014 — in any regard "Best of Breed," yet data suggests that 75 percent of Fortune 500 companies have some SharePoint located somewhere in the organization. Projects often resonate with “can’t we just use SharePoint for this?" given that for many use cases it provides “just enough” to enable a result. Many an existing Marketing Automation sales cycle will now be interrupted with a similar refrain: “We should first look at what Microsoft is doing here.”
More worrying for its competitors is that for all the current talk of the platform being available as “stand-alone” from Dynamics CRM as a separately licensed product, Microsoft is the king of product bundlers. For example it recent added an OEM for InsideView’s customer intelligence data as a part of the base platform, and it is likely to add other similar fold-in technology features in time too. Dynamics Marketing will be viewed as part of a battle for marketshare, not for top-line revenue (let alone anything on the bottom-line).
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It's a valid point: MS sheer presence alone makes it an automatic competitor. However, the SharePoint analogy doesn't fly: MAS can only be accomplished company or division wide, as it requires the full DB. One DB, one MAS.