Sometimes it's hard to distinguish between a new innovative approach and a reactionary response to an inherent. But in either case, a relatively federated approach to CRM (customer relationship management) that is being put forward by Avanade, a system integrator owned jointly by Microsoft and Accenture, is worth some consideration.
Avanade's fundamental approach is that customers need to recognize the reality and limitations of any CRM system because despite what companies such as SAP or Oracle might say, every CRM implementation within a company is different and every business unit in that company has different sets of requirements. Therefore any attempt to impose a single instance of a CRM application on the entire business is fundamentally flawed. Instead, what companies need to do is let individual business units manage their own CRM implementation as they see fit and then unify them under a distributed data framework that allows the entire company to access and view that data without requiring that everybody have the same version of the software running or, for that matter, even the same software from a single vendor.
In the case of Avanade, the argument they are specifically making is that a distributed data framework based on Microsoft.Net and BizTalk creates the foundation for a federated approach to CRM that is more flexible and adaptable to the needs of business units that invariably make up a corporation.
In the case of Microsoft CRM, this approach also has a certain "necessity being the mother of invention" aspect to it because it creates a model under which an existing version of Microsoft CRM can more readily scale to meet the needs of the business, at least until we see what the actual future upgrade of Microsoft CRM, codenamed Titan, can actually do.
There's no question that this distributed approach may be more difficult to manage than a centralized architecture, but even in an SAP or Oracle environment this approach may make sense using Java middleware because it more readily meets the needs of the business versus the wants of the IT department.
And although vendors want to call this a federated model, the term federated inherently implies centralization. A more apt description would be to think of this as a confederacy of CRM implementations, but for obvious reasons nobody wants to use that as the marketing term to describe this approach. Whether a distributed approach to data management is the right thing will vary widely across multiple customers. But it's definitely worthy of discussion because it cuts to the core of how a company strategically thinks about the use of data and IT in general.