HP announces it is moving from Salesforce and Oracle products to Microsoft CRM to manage its sales and post-sales processes
Context & Ripple Effects
HP's CRM switch is the second act of a deliberate Microsoft alignment: Hewlett Packard Enterprise had already made Azure its preferred cloud alternative in a partnership struck last November, and Microsoft gave that alliance a product to sell when it folded ERP and CRM into the cloud-based Dynamics suite just two months before this announcement.
The timing matters because HP is not swapping point tools — it is handing Microsoft both its sales and post-sales workflows, displacing Salesforce and Oracle simultaneously at one of enterprise software's most visible accounts.
First-order effects
- Salesforce and Oracle each lose a flagship enterprise customer's workflow to Microsoft, with HP's post-sales processes — historically Oracle territory — moving to Dynamics as well.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft gains a reference account to pitch Dynamics 365 against both rivals' suites, forcing Salesforce and Oracle to defend renewal cycles at other large accounts where the Azure-Dynamics bundle can now be cited as proof of enterprise readiness.
Third-order effects
- If bundled cloud suites keep winning consolidated deals like this, enterprise applications drift from best-of-breed procurement toward single-vendor stacks, raising switching costs and pressuring standalone CRM and database vendors on price.
The trend: Enterprise software purchasing is consolidating around integrated cloud suites, with Microsoft using Azure partnerships to pull application workloads onto Dynamics.