Genesis acquires Increase CRM: FAQs

Are there any changes to our agreed terms and conditions?
No, there are no immediate changes to the terms and conditions of any agreements you had with Increase Ltd. Over the next few months, you will be moved across to the Genesis terms and conditions. We will be contacting you shortly.

What’s happening to billing?
You will have received your March invoices from Increase CRM. From April onwards, we will begin to transfer your contracts to Genesis Communications Ltd. Following this, you will receive all future invoices from Genesis.

For April billing, invoices will be dated later than the start of the month as we go through the contract transfer process.

Genesis accept payments by Direct debit. If you currently pay by:

• Debit/credit card and direct debit: on transfer of your contract, your payment details will be passed from Increase CRM to Genesis. In the interim, you will continue to see Increase CRM as the organisation on your bank statements.
• Bank transfer/ cheque: you will see our bank details on our invoice to you. Please amend your records to update payment details to our bank account.

Going forward, we aim to move all payments on to direct debit, especially if you currently pay by bank transfer and cheque. This will be discussed with you as we transfer the contracts over to Genesis.

Are there any changes to CRM support?
There are no immediate changes to how you receive CRM support. You can still reach the Increase CRM help desk by calling 020 8099 1302 or emailing help@increasecrm.co.uk. CRM cases will be investigated and resolved by the same team of CRM heroes as before. In the next few months, the support numbers will change and we will communicate the new details to you in plenty of time.

How do I find out more about other Genesis products and services such as hosted Microsoft Exchange, hosted SharePoint or mobile solutions?
Genesis customers are managed by regional account managers. Please contact the Increase CRM help desk and we will put you in touch with your local Genesis account manager.

Who has left Increase CRM?
Two of Increase CRM’s directors, George Bliss and Jon Sturgeon, have moved on. Neil Benson and the rest of the Increase CRM team are now part of Genesis.

Have any contact details changed?
The Increase CRM team has now moved to the Genesis London hub. Our new address is: 12-16 Clerkenwell Road, London, EC1M 5PQ. You can continue to use all the Increase CRM contact details. Over time, our email addresses and phone numbers will change and we will keep you posted about how you can continue to communicate with CRM support heroes too.

What are the plans for migrating Increase CRM servers to Genesis?
Increase CRM’s servers were hosted by Rackspace. Genesis has its own data centre in Leicester and a secondary facility in Bury. We will be migrating all hosted CRM systems from Rackspace to Genesis during the weekend of 4-5 April. During this migration there will be a period of downtime that we will schedule to minimise disruption to your hosted CRM service.

On this weekend Rackspace were planning to move Increase CRM’s servers to the new Rackspace data centre, which would have involved six hours of downtime. Rather than migrate to a new Rackspace data centre and then later to the Genesis data centre, we are planning to minimise disruption by moving the service directly to Leicester.

Particularly with regards to hosted CRM, what are the future plans of Genesis?
Genesis are making significant investments in mobile and hosted IT services, including:

• Improved Infrastructure – to make hosted CRM faster, more resilient and secure
• New Products and Services – such as mobile CRM to compliment its mobile phone and mobile email services, and new CRM add-on products
• Better Tools and Communications – as well as a fresh new brand to be launched this summer, Genesis will be launching improved customer communication channels such as a customer portal and community for CRM customers

Update Rollup 3 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM team released Update Rollup 3 last week. (Increase CRM is the only hosted CRM partner in Europe to have a Microsoft Dynamics Partner Advantage Plan, so we got a 'heads up' a couple of weeks ago.)

We'd consider Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 to be a mature, stable product, so as expected Update Rollup 3 contains fewer hotfixes than previous rollups. Update Rollup 3 contains six previously released hotfixes and resolutions for many minor issues. None of the hotfixes or resolutions are known to affect any of our customers or are considered major.

Our initial internal testing of Update Rollup 3 is going well and we expect to deploy this update on our hosted CRM platform within the next few weeks. Once the server components have been installed, we will be distributing the client component for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 for Outlook to all our users.

Latest Microsoft CRM Statement of Direction

Microsoft has published an update to the Dynamics CRM Statement of Direction that was released last year.

The highlights for the next version of CRM include:

New Levels of User Productivity and Collaboration Capabilities

• Improved view of CRM data within Microsoft Outlook
• New 'ribbon' user interface
• Streamlined user interface with fewer pop-up forms, clicks and keystrokes
• Personalisation of views
• Greater levels of SharePoint integration
• Inline reports for better business intelligence
• More options for balancing workloads and prioritising tasks

Continued Enrichment of Core CRM Capabilities

• Visualisation of contact and account hierarchies
• Team-based collaboration
• Call centre and unified communications improvements
• Additional revenue recognition, forecasting, revenue management features
• New team-selling features in sales opportunities
• Further investment in knowledge management
• Extended outbound marketing capabilities, particularly email marketing
• Ability to schedule future recurring activities

Best-of Breed Business Solution Platform

• Ability for developers to build application packages, called "Solutions", that will provide the ability to easily add, update and remove add-ons
• Secure code on the server
• Integration with Windows Azure cloud services platform
• Data auditing
• Extended use of Windows Workflow Foundation
• Global picklists and hierarchical/cascading picklists
• Improved Visual Studio integration
• Improved multi-tenanted management for hosting partners (yeah!)
• Greater leveraging of Windows Hyper-V for virtualisation, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 for business intelligence and Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 for integration

The Statement of Direction also includes a summary of the CRM solution accelerators:

• Analytics
• eService
• Event Management
• Enterprise Search
• Extended Sales Forecasting
• RSS Notifications
• Sales Methodologies (to be released Q1 2009)
• Newsfeed Business Producitivity (released March 2009)

It also covers:

• Mobile Express for CRM 4.0
• Ten Digits Alliance for mobile CRM on Windows Mobile and BlackBerry devices

Still no scheduled release date though. Our money is on Q1 2010, and a name change - Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2010, or possibly even Microsoft Dynamics xRM 2010 - who knows?

CRM record counter on grids

Ever asked yourself, "how many records are in this view?" and found yourself counting the number of pages of results one-by-one? There are a couple of elegrant third-party add-ons that provide the often-requested record counter and page counter features on CRM grids.

• GlobalInterface GI CRMGRID Record Counter ($500)
• HubKey Dynamics CRM 4.0 Record Count/Page Count Addon ($350)

If you're an Increase-hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM customer and interested in either of these record counter add-ons, please let us know. We're currently testing them and hope to release one of them on our on-demand CRM platform soon.

New CRM Business Productivity Accelerator released

Microsoft has released the latest accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0: the Newsfeed Business Productivity Accelerator.

The Newsfeed Business Productivity accelerator provides a dashboard that shows users all the recent activity within the CRM system, for example: cases created, sales opportunities won (or lost!), marketing campaigns launched, and so on. The goal of the Newsfeed Business Productivity accelerator is to present live CRM data in a way that your users will find appealing and interactive and encouraging user adoption.

CRM administrators will be able to configure the newsfeed dashboard to display notifications about updates to any type of entity, including custom entities.


















The screenshot (courtesy of Joel Lindstrom's Customer Effective blog) shows a typical Newsfeed Dashboard showing the day-by-day updates to CRM records, each with the entity icon and a clickable hyperlink to the record itself.

Over the next few weeks, Increase CRM will be testing this new accelerator ready for deployment at no charge to all our hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 customers.

Genesis Communications acquires Increase CRM to create the UK’s leading provider of hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM services

Genesis Communications is pleased to announce that it has acquired Increase CRM, for an undisclosed sum, to become the UK’s leading provider of hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM solutions.

The acquisition of Increase CRM represents the next step by Genesis to become the UK’s leading provider of mobile and hosted IT solutions to small and medium-sized enterprises. Genesis will combine its considerable investment in its hosting platform with Increase CRM’s leadership and expertise in providing hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM solutions and value added professional services.

Increase CRM’s customers will benefit immediately as their hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM services are migrated to Genesis’ purpose built data centre, located in Leicester. Customers will also be able to benefit immediately from a broader range of high quality and cost saving services such as hosted Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange and Office Communication Server which can be integrated with Microsoft Dynamics CRM for improved collaboration and communication. Genesis will also soon be launching a mobile CRM solution which will allow customers to access their Microsoft Dynamics CRM data on the move using their mobile device.

Piers Linney, director of Genesis, said, “Genesis is absolutely focused on providing the leading suite of mobile and hosted IT solutions for small and medium-sized enterprises in the UK. The acquisition of Increase CRM allows us to become a UK market leader and dramatically extends our ability to support customers and deliver the value added professional services that our customers are demanding as they increasingly embrace the power of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. We look forward to working together to develop this exciting market and our offering.”

Neil Benson, chief addict at Increase CRM added, “The team of passionate CRM addicts at Increase CRM are extremely excited about joining Genesis. We can now offer our customers a wider range of mobile and hosted solutions, combined with the added security of the significant investment that Genesis has made in its infrastructure.”

Microsoft has launched a global Software+Services strategy in response to the demand for hosted IT services. By 2011, analyst firm Gartner predicts that 25% of all software will be delivered as a service.

Martin Walker, Software+Services - UK Lead, Microsoft UK commented, “Both Genesis and Increase CRM are Microsoft Gold Partners focused on leading the development of the Software+Services market. We are excited by the announcement of the acquisition. Microsoft is strategically committed to the Software+Services model across its business products suite and is working closely with its partners to take solutions to market. The acquisition further enhances the capabilities of Genesis, which is a business with the infrastructure, scale and the necessary expertise to offer a compelling Microsoft Dynamics CRM proposition.”

About Increase CRM
Increase CRM is the Microsoft Dynamics CRM hosted services business of Increase Ltd. Founded in 2002, Increase Ltd was among the first Microsoft partners to offer hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM in 2006. Increase CRM was the first Microsoft partner in the world to offer hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 in December 2007 and has established itself as a the UK leader in hosted Microsoft CRM.

About Genesis Communications
Genesis Communications Limited is an independent and leading provider of mobile and hosted IT solutions to UK small and medium-sized enterprises. The company has 250 employees based in Manchester, Leicester and London and generated revenues of c.£33M in 2008.
Genesis provides mobile voice and data solutions to approximately 15,000 customers. The company has invested in a wholly owned state-of-the-art data centre in Leicester with infrastructure to provide managed services and Software-as-a-Service IT solutions, such as Microsoft Hosted Exchange 2007, Microsoft Hosted SharePoint 2007, Microsoft Office Communication Server and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.

The company has achieved a total of 7 Microsoft Gold Partner competencies and its objective is to become the leading provider of unified communications and IT solutions to UK small and medium-sized enterprises.

For More Information
Press information:
Steve Leigh and Helen Taylor, Citypress
Tel: 0161 235 0300 Email: steve@citypress.co.uk Helen.Taylor@citypress.co.uk

Kath Dewar, marketing director, Genesis Communications
Tel: 0161 447 2026 Email: helen.shuttleworth@genesis.co.uk

Neil Benson, chief addict, Increase CRM
Tel: 020 8099 1304 Email: neil.benson@increasecrm.co.uk