What an awesome, information filled and action packed day at the Convergence 2012!

JoeCRM enjoyed last night at the Minute Maid Stadium with our friends, rocking out to Daughtry and getting tour of the Astros locker room. Deb Victor of PowerObjects also met Daughtry back stage through her participation in the Convergence Partner Advisory Council. Despite the late night, everyone was pumped up and ready to go early in the morning. Did I mention the mechanical bull?

The opening Keynote of the Convergence 2012 was given by Kevin Turner, COO of Microsoft, and Kirill Tatarinov, President of Microsoft Business Solutions Division (who rocks the cowboy hat!). The Keynote highlighted the continuing explosion of cloud computing and social networking in enterprise environments as well as the IT consumerization, mobility and people centric solutions. Windows 8, Azure and mobile platforms were highlighted in exciting demos during the keynote.

The same themes were further reinforced in CRM General Session, led by Dennis Michalis, General Manager if Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The session was fittingly named 'Power of Possibilities' as it highlighted one of PowerObjects clients, Safety Kleen. Carla Rolinc, VP of IT for Safety Kleen talked about how they saved over $500,000 moving off of salesforce.com and to Dynamics CRM with the help of PowerObjects. The implementation was done in less than 90 days, while adding another 700 users to the system. The business is now achieving higher efficiency, the users are happy with the IT department, and Carla is no longer up at night updating her resume!

Safety Kleen, Specialists On Call and Centene were all recognized at the Customer Excellence Awards Luncheon today.

Another interesting demo was shown by Craig Dewar, the Director of Product Management MS CRM. He showed from his iPad how he is using a rich Microsoft Dynamics CRM Client. Needless to say, Microsoft Executive demoing an iPad app was a sight to see that many of us would not have believed few years ago. Microsoft is truly moving to enabling all users and all platforms for CRM.

Among plethora of interesting sessions was another session where PowerObjects was highlighted: Microsoft presented 'Top 10 Solutions from the Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace' – where PowerSurvey was showcased as an add-on that provides efficiency within Dynamics CRM.

This is also the time for Expo Reception, all the JoeCRMs and JaneCRMs have been very busy and happy for the attention we have been getting at the booth. If you are here and have not yet visited us, be sure to visit us! (Booth #704)

See ya tomorrow. Happy CRM'ing!