What is xRM?

We hope the following proves educational at best, insightful at worst. As always, we love feeback.

What is xRM? Defined by us.

xRM is Anything(x) Relationship Management. It is the concept of leveraging a flexible and powerful platform, and the applications sitting on that platform, to meet any and all business requirements. Furthermore, to do so while taking advantage of Software-Plus-Service.

The xRM.com 80/20 rule. Understand the Microsoft .Net platform and applications sitting on the platform. Achieve 80% of your business requirements by using and integrating out of the box .Net applications. Then, use 20% custom development to make the application, or collective applications, do precisely what you need them to do.

xRM is the natural evolution of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Over a decade ago it started with a rolodex. Then someone decided to create a software version of a rolodex which led to contact managers and personal information managers. As people and companies began to see and feel the tremendous value that these tools were bringing, they wanted more. This incessant appetite to always want more, track more, do more, report on more, created the CRM industry which has been going strong for about a decade. About five years ago we started evangelizing the concept of doing much more than simply managing and tracking customer relationships. It was clear that companies and people are all very unique and forcing them to adapt and work to something that was designed without intricately knowing them (people/companies) was a very tall order. Furthermore, if and when CRM was successfully deployed and companies began leveraging a common database, they again started wanting more than the application was designed to do. They no longer wanted to simply manage customer relationships; they wanted the ability to manage anything. This has evolved into what is referred to as xRM. The x being the mathematical variable x which can be anything. Transpose the x for the C in CRM and you get xRM, i.e., anything relationship management.

Select a platform, then a product/application. While there are many platforms available, our preference is the Microsoft .Net platform. At xRM.com we believe Microsoft has the most compelling business strategy. More specifically, their commitment to business applications and the enterprise is unrivaled. Visual Studio and the .Net framework are big part of this commitment and are keys to the services and strategy at xRM.com. Microsoft Dynamics CRM plays a huge role in what we do at xRM.com and you will typically find it at the core of any solution we design, architect, and implement. The beauty of leveraging the Microsoft .Net platform as a starting point is that there are many applications already sitting on the platform, all of which have been written in the same language (.net). These applications and can be easily integrated to provide simple yet powerful and scalable solutions and is the key to accelerating success and attaining value.

xRM is a flexible development platform. Accelerate the creation of Line of Business (LOB) applications using Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a flexible development platform. See our xRM Brochure

Rapid development platform (RDP). By leveraging the Microsoft Dynamics CRM framework (database, UI, workflow, reporting engine), a savvy user or business analyst can now accomplish what before would require a developer. In other words, RDP means no need for custom development or a developer.