Pain
Sohu.com（NASDAQ:SOHU）is the major internet content & service sponsor for 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. It is the top new media, communication and mobile value added service provider. Meanwhile, it is also the best internet brand in mandarin world. Sohu.com is the most popular brand in China. By now, it has more than 100 million registered users, and its browsing volume reaches to 700 million. It is also the best choice for Chinese people in news portal and net surfing. With coming Beijing Olympic Games, Sohu is facing fierce competition against local & international players.

With its business volume increasing, its daily jobs and cross-units collaboration were processed manually and excel-based, thus it is very necessary and urgent to have a management supporting system which could support well-organised sales management, and cross team collaboration with quick response, flexible & systemic and interactive communication. With its business model’s diversity, it is critical for Sohu to have a dynamic application system to quickly adopt the new business model and leave enough preparation for the new changes in future. Before this CRM system, the customer profile was manually controlled. This brought risk to customer profile management. Thus, this system should provide powerful effective & efficient mechanics to secure its core value. The CRM system should well connect to its legacy systems, such as UFDIA’s Financial System and also has potential to achieve business intelligence goal.

Power & Opportunity Execution
Sohu began its product vendor evaluation half years before its implementation project. UFIDA was trying to extend its practice in ERP, which has CRM model, to the potential CRM system. Oracle was presenting its Siebel solution to Sohu. MS CRM is strong in its platform flexibility, customer adoption, integration advantage with SQL Server and .Net technology. Since all of three competitors do not have industry solution in media, Sohu got to know there should large volume of customization and development. From this point of view, Microsoft is very powerful in mature research development mechanics, well organized API and lower IT cost and high ROI.

MBS team was working closely with partner in POC. Our PAM and PTS were collecting the customer business requirement together with partner’s business consultants and pre-sales engineers, then designing Sohu’s Data model, business processes and integration with its legacy systems.

MBS SSP worked close with EPG’s account team in organizing demos, keeping good relationship with different business units’ leadership, and providing feedback to the demo team.

Our partner also worked with EPG’s TS to help the Sohu to design its IT strategy planning, to list all the potential risks for its application system building, and to provide the feasible implementation methodology to guide the project, in detailed business requirement, business process re-engineering, technical design, coding and unified system integration testing, and finally user adoption training & user menu designing.

Competition
Ufida – Sohu could extend its Ufida’s ERP models from Financial to more, like CRM model.
Oracle – Oracle China’s high-level executive people visiting Sohu to present how important Sohu’s CRM system is for Oracle’s Sieble practice in media industry:

• Oracle is the proven solution for companies like Telecom carrier, Banks and Manufacturer.
• We spend $1 Billion in R&D on business applications
• You may be considering Microsoft, in regards to supporting an organization like Sohu they are completely unproven & risky
• The Dynamics CRM product has a very small # of China installations
• You’ll not get this level of senior exec support from MS, as this represents an insignificant portion of their overall business

Value
CRM project firstly is about corporate culture changes, business management revolutionary and IT infrastructure re-engineering. Sohu.com is willing to change itself to match the gap between its internal management and challenges from external competition situation & business models. Dynamics CRM is so flexible, powerful and easy for user adoption from the following points:

• System data integration with standard data model and business management procedures
• Truly internet-based application system, which could support mobile application and offline operations
• Put the Customer in the central, and fulfil this idea in real operation
• Systemic right-control, and business oriented monitoring
• Multiple accessing ways to CRM system

Vision
Sohu’s development trend is changed dramatically with Chinese internet development booming and the coming Beijing Olympic games. Chinese new generation is more and more accessing to info through news portal, net surfing and BBS. More than ever, corporations would like to do their advertisement on internet to attract eye balls. As the most popular news portal, Sohu was experiencing bad customer experiences, hard to indentify customer requirement changes and provide powerful, easy-use and mobile tools to support their daily jobs. When lots of foreign visitors, global national companies are intending to know China markets, do business in China and put China as one critical part of its global value chain with coming Olympic Games, Sohu is facing fierce competition from global media gurus, professional content & service providers, and reproving customers. Thus, it is time for Sohu to make all the necessary changes in management and IT to match those gaps. Dynamics CRM can provide a solid, extendable and easy-to-use platform. Our partner is proved to have such capability to make those changes become true in a realistic tool.

Implementation Plan
At the beginning, Evenhi’s business consultants collected business requirements from three different functional view: high-level decision makers, mid-tier unit managers and operational system users. The implementation strategy is high-level design, implementation model by model, from operation to analytics then to collaboration, and cross-units integrations. Sohu’s project team were highly involving the overall design, developed & customize, testing & deployment. This can make sure the project was heading the right way and progress was under track.