Nimble and Microsoft are Getting ever Closer

It has been three months since I last talked with Jon Ferrara,CEOof Nimble. Back in February, he introduced me to their Nimble Smart Contacts add-in to Outlook Mobile. It delivered people and company social relationship insights for free to over 40M Outlook Mobile users. Since then, he and his Nimble team have been pretty busy working with Microsoft, as one could see from his Facebook posts – having one coordination session in Seattle after the other.
Nimble will soon announce that they extended the Nimble freemium Smart Contacts for Outlook Mobile add-in to become a free plugin into Outlook Desktop Windows/Mac and Office 365. This move recognizes that the world is going cloud and mobile and that the Microsoft stack of productivity applications is the most widely used set of applications in Enterprises of all sizes. Google applications, with the notable exception of Google Mail, do not stand a chance here. The same holds true for Salesforce, which acquired the productivity tool startup Quip in August of last year, or Zoho’s Docs, or any  other smaller vendor tools.
The logical next step is to ?
… integrate Nimble into Outlook Desktop and Office 365.  I already speculated about this in my February post:
Imagine the following: The Smart Contacts App, or instead Nimble turning into a part of the Office365 fabric, going for walks with the overall Microsoft application stack, like Outlook, Skype, Team, Dynamics, Office365, LinkedIn, PowerBI and Azure. Add the fact that many smaller groups are though jogging with out a CRM device, however simply use their mail customers and spreedsheets ? And MS Office. Continue the concept with: Salesforce, SugarCRM, SAP, Dynamics are too high-priced and too ?Clumsy?, client-unfriendly. Add the concept of a deep integration into the Office Graph/LinkedIn graph, and all of the unexpected there's a powerful and low-priced social income and marketing answer for Microsoft Office365 clients.
Mind you, there however is probably gaps at the provider, specifically on the marketing aspect, however that could be a story for some other day. For now I do see massive capability in this partnership.
And unsurprisingly, that is exactly what Jon and his group did during the last 3 months. With this new integration the Nimble Smart Contact Manager comes up internal all Office 365 productivity and industrial corporation programs, plus Outlook, Skype, Teams, and and so forth., giving clients the wealthy contact data that Nimble collect in real time. This is absolutely in line with Jon?S vision of Nimble ?Becoming the sector?S man or woman and corporations? Easy, smart and social touch supervisor?.
This is Big, for both parties!
The E-Mail inbox stays the most extensively used de facto touch supervisor. There are estimations that more than 80 percent of groups global do no longer use any contact manager or CRM software at all.
With this step of integrating deeper into the MS material, Nimble comes a long way towards Jon?S imaginative and prescient thru gaining access to a big range of potential commercial enterprise users who need just a piece greater than just e-mail and for whom Dynamics365 and LinkedIn Sales Navigator is truly too pricey and too clumsy, or surely plainly no longer beneficial to human beings with easy desires. By staying associated with Google, Nimble rides on the 2 maximum acquainted e-mail systems.
But what?S in it for Microsoft, you ask?
Microsoft, because the opportunity Enterprise CRM corporations (Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, SugarCRM, and plenty of others.) face increasing pressure through businesses that started out out off with the useful resource of addressing the SMB marketplace, specifically the lower surrender of it. Salesforce itself concentrated first on smaller corporations or departmental answers that brought them a foot in the door. With this profits technique, based completely upon the subscription and cloud software program models, they disrupted the marketplace ? And moved on to come to be an organisation player. SAP is clawing its way down with one-of-a-type answers that focus on smaller corporations than their trendy customers. Microsoft so far did the equal upward flow that Salesforce did. The origins of Microsoft?S commercial enterprise packages (Axapta and Navision) had been SMB-oriented. Now they're targeting Enterprises, of which there are most effective such a lot of. SugarCRM currently moves further.
In short, the ones vendors are susceptible to aggressive SMB companies like Zoho and others, which can disrupt them from under.
Microsoft dreams a choice to cope with this vulnerability.
In comes Nimble to add smooth social income and advertising and marketing and advertising to Office365. At a reasonable price aspect, Nimble is probably to offer 80 to ninety percentage of the capability that small company salespeople need to develop their commercial enterprise. And this in a very usable manner, automating lots of the facts amassing in the historical past. Not having to accumulate this information and enter it manually into the contact database gives at once price. In assessment to studying to ride a bicycle, Nimble ?Might be like the training wheels? To Dynamics365 and LinkedIn Sales Navigator says Jon, ?We are capable of onboard tens of millions of human beings to Microsoft Enterprise Apps and plenty of will now not want more than that?.
In precis, Microsoft profits the capability to attract a whole lot of smaller companies that could in any other case keep in mind some different supplier?S CRM, to their platform. With the foot inside the door, Microsoft then has the opportunity to without problem improve those customers to Dynamics365 commercial enterprise packages.

Let?S see what the subsequent steps are on this partnership. It has the capacity to be very symbiotic. It additionally has the capacity of Nimble becoming Microsoft?S access choice to CRM.