Nissan today announced a strategic deal with Microsoft to create a global customer relationship management (CRM) system for its dealers.
The new system will be based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM software to create a set of customer and dealer relationship management and social collaboration tools.
The tools will then be delivered using the software vendor's cloudy platform-as-a-service (PaaS), Windows Azure, in a roll out to the automotive giant's dealership networks in Japan and other strategic geographical regions.
"Nissan is seeking a solution that will help meet our business needs, especially to better understand our customers and dealers," said Andy Palmer, Nissan executive vice president.
Kirill Tatarinov, Microsoft Business Solutions president, said the deal would deliver a CRM system that effectively connects Nissan with its customers.
Nissan also said it intends to explore how Dynamics CRM and Windows Azure can be used together as a platform to deploy other applications across the company's global network and potentially standardise its information architecture on cloud-based resource.
Microsoft has been aggressively trying to win customers over to hosted Dynamics CRM software for some time now.
Steve Ballmer, Microsoft chief executive, and his opposite number at cloud rival Salesforce.com, Marc Benioff, entered into a mini war of words at Dell World recently.
