Microsoft Partners With Versium, Takes On Salesforce
- by Jess Nelson , October 13, 2016
Microsoft and Versium announced a partnership on Wednesday to integrate Versium Predict into the soon-to-be-released Microsoft Dynamics 365 to deliver automated, predictive targeting.
Microsoft first announced Dynamics 365 this summer and unveiled more details on its combined CRM and ERP service on Tuesday, announcing that the first components of Dynamics 365 will begin rolling out November 1.
Hosted on the Microsoft Azure cloud, Dynamics 365 is a suite of business applications for sales, marketing and customer service. Seven initial applications will be released next month in more than 135 markets and in 40 different languages, Microsoft revealed in a blog post announcing the news.
Microsoft has effectively bundled a variety of separate products into a single platform, with a foundation of artificial intelligence.
Two features in particular involve data intelligence: Customer Insights and Relationship Insights. Customer Insights enables users to integrate data from internal and third-party sources to power marketing and sales automated workflows and hosts data from external partners like Facebook and Trip Advisor. Built on Microsoft’s Cortana Intelligence Suite, Relationship Insights provides users with customer relationship status updates in real-time.
Users of Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 will soon be able to leverage Versium’s predictive automated solution, Versium Predict, to improve lead generation performance as well.
Versium powers LifeData, a database of more than 1 trillion consumer and business data attributes, ranging across both online and offline behavior. These data characteristics, such as demographic or financial information, are then matched to a company’s internal data and applied with machine-learning algorithms to improve customer acquisition and retention.
The Microsoft integration will apply the LifeData database to customer data already available in Dynamics 365, allowing users to construct predictive models to create new, data-driven and targeted prospect lists of those who are most likely to engage and/or purchase. The application can create targeted lists across email, direct mail and online display advertising campaigns.
“Versium Predict fully automates predictive lead scoring and prospect list generation, leveraging vast volumes of both business and consumer data,” states Jujhar Singh, corporate vice president of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Considering that Salesforce unveiled Einstein last week at Dreamfore and Oracle touted artificial intelligence at OpenWorld, Dynamics 365 is Microsoft’s attempt to remain competitive in the marketing cloud marketplace.
