Portland Trail Blazers Picks Microsoft CRM

In addition to receiving the right to select the first draft pick this year (Ohio State's Greg Oden), the Trail Blazers selected Microsoft CRM 3.0 for their Customer Relationship Management solution, to deploy 100 licenses.

The Trail Blazers will be launching the CRM system over the next few months even though the project has been in the works for several years. "Over the past three years, we've been working on this plan to rebuild our systems for when we started to hit this product cycle going back up," Chris Dill, vice president and CIO with the team said. "It just happens it went up drastically because of the luck of getting the No. 1 draw."

Things are looking up for the Trail Blazers, and they seem to be looking up for Microsoft CRM as well. The company reports that it sold more than 85,000 seats of Microsoft Dynamics CRM in the last quarter, and it is preparing to release the next version of its CRM product, code-named Titan, complete with a multi-tenant, on-demand version, in the fourth quarter.

One might think that for a basketball team owned by Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, the decision to deploy Microsoft CRM was an easy one, but Allen does not have a hands-on approach at that level, according to Dill.

Rather, a couple of things appealed to Dill about Microsoft CRM, particularly its tight integration with the Outlook email client, an application most of the organization works within already. He added that the .NET architecture, mobile integration platform and a workflow engine, which the team doesn't have with their previous solution, were all factors.