GreenStone Farm Credit Services needed a way to cope with its rapid growth. The merger of four Farm Credit Associations into one in January 2000, and the merger with an association in the Upper Peninsula and Northeast Wisconsin in January 2003, left the company with 17,000 customers and a need to view customer accounts in a much more automated way.

The solutions GreenStone chose – a combination of Microsoft CRM and the Cisco Business Communications Solution – are examples of the recent push both large vendors have made to make their solutions more accessible for the midsize market. In fact, Microsoft held its first ever Business Summit for midsize companies just last month. At the summit, Microsoft announced that Microsoft CRM, the solution used by Greenstone FCS, will next year become Microsoft Dynamics CRM as the company rolls out its Microsoft Dynamics product line, which will include a technology foundation of 50 core roles based on specific job functions within a midsize business.

While some of the components of the Cisco solution came out earlier, the Cisco Business Communications Solution as a family of products tailored to small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) was also launched last month. The seamless integration of the two companies’ products builds on the Microsoft-Cisco small-to-medium business partnership announced last year February.

The midsize market, according to research conducted by AMI, consists of 1.4 million businesses worldwide with a projected annual growth rate of 5 percent. Midsize companies have an installed base of 68 million PCs, with an average of 49 per company, as well as 4.8 million servers, or 3.4 per company. In terms of IT investments, midsize businesses spent $134 billion on software and IT services in 2004, which is expected to grow to $185 billion by 2009.

For GreenStone FCS, the problem according to Dominic Roberts, director of Information Services, was that service representatives had to open several applications to get a complete view of the customer. The problem was slowing down service response times.

“The success of our business is based on customer relationships— – often with second-generation or third-generation farming families who have worked with GreenStone for several decades,” says Roberts. “The finances of individual family members often are interrelated, making it even more difficult to get a complete picture of the customer relationship.”

Microsoft CRM gave GreenStone FCS a comprehensive view of customers, including their histories, the products they used and the needs of their business. As a result, the company is able to give its much larger customer base the personalized feel of its earlier days.

Meanwhile, to converge the dozens of telecom systems the company had acquired as a result of the merger into a single voice and data network, GreenStone FCS turned to Cisco. For GreenStone, the converged network solution included the Cisco CallManager IP Communications platform; an upgraded network foundation including the installation of Cisco routers and switches at company headquarters as well as branch locations; and the Cisco CRM Communications Connector, which was developed with technical information and feedback from Microsoft. The Cisco CRM Communications Connector integrates seamlessly with the Microsoft CRM.