During December 6-10, 2010, Microsoft hosted an xRM Cloud Acceleration Lab in Redmond, Washington. Cincom Systems was present to explain how they are using Dynamics CRM 2011 and Azure for their product Cincom Guru. Guru is an application that allows companies to encode their advanced business rules and logic workflows into their software applications while allowing non-programmers to easily change those rules when needed.

The coupling of Guru and CRM allow for more advanced product configuration than its competitors, so that the customer receives products and services tailored to their exact needs. Greg Doud, Senior Product Manager at Cincom says, “Our product mostly focuses on helping CRM users bring knowledge enablement and configured products to the Microsoft CRM system.” Although Cincom has worked with CRM in the past, the 2011 version is taking Guru’s capabilities to new heights.

One new application of Guru is a CRM interface that monitors the data in accounts with large balances to be updated quickly and semi automatically so the management of the company can tell whether an account needs attention and if so, the severity of the condition. For example, if a company wants to organize customers from recurring clients to one-time clients. Guru allows them to keep track of large outstanding balances, which aren’t as tolerated in clients they do not frequently do business with.

As part of the cloud solution Cincom Guru is using Windows Azure. Doud explains, “Since many of our customers don’t want to be in the infrastructure business anymore, they’re asking us about hosting their solution in the cloud.” Since the Azure platform allows Cincom to tailor their hosted solutions to clients, giving large computing power to big companies who need it, but a smaller less costly environment to smaller customers to save them money. Azure allows Guru to scale any company up or down in the cloud making a very affordable and reliable solution for them.

In the video above, Sanjay Jain, ISV Architect Evangelist at Microsoft Corporation, interviews Greg Doud to discuss how they are using CRM 2011 and Azure to elevate Guru.