The Microsoft and Salesforce partnership appears to have been an intelligent one, with Microsoft’s commercial cloud revenue growing 114%, equating to an annualized revenue of $5.5 billion. The end of 2014 saw an expansion of the CRM family with the release of CRM 2015, January 2015 saw the acquisition of Parature, and later this year, a huge number of additions are coming to CRM that will affect it both online and on-premises. Although Salesforce is still technically a winning competitor, partnering with Salesforce has brought them into the Microsoft ecosystem, turning them into less of a threat. While other competitors like SugarCRM and NetSuite CRM+ remain on the market, it’s clear that Dynamics CRM – and its integration across all of Microsoft’s platforms powered by Azure and Office 365 – is the future. The new announcements suggest that Microsoft’s ambitions for its CRM platform are both changing and growing year on year, as their new list of updates has been amended since last year. In 2014, they announced the delivery of the following updates in the second quarter of calendar 2015: • Dynamics CRM “Carina” • Social Listening “Corvus” • Dynamics Marketing “Spica” • Parature “Taurus” The updated roadmap now lists the following set of deliverables for Q2 2015: • Dynamics CRM “Carina” • Social Listening “Hydra” • Dynamics Marketing “Spica” • Parature “Atria” Social Listening “Corvus” is now listed as a Q4 2015 deliverable. Also due in the fourth quarter of this calendar year is another version of Dynamics CRM, codenamed “Ara”; Dynamics Marketing “Capella”; and Parature “Hercules.”