The Holy Grail of Computing… the “Platform”

I was recently reading a blog post about Amazon's Web Services and I must say I was surprised with all their on-the-cloud offerings because I didn’t have them on the radar as more than a retailer. This of course brought me to think about the common pattern that, inevitably, all successful applications tend to follow… become a platform.

Think about it… what happened with Salesforce.com? They developed a reasonable successful application and then realized Gee… all these things that we have in place... we could package it and sell it as a platform. Don’t tell me that they always wanted to be a platform because I just don’t buy that argument. Now Force.com is out as their SAAS platform and suddenly they are not in the CRM business (exclusively) anymore.

What about us (MS CRM)… since our 3.0 release (years ago), we built a super solid “platform” to extend our application and now there are plenty of partners and ISVs that use our product as a business solutions platform to develop XRM solutions. With CRM 4.0 we took our platform a huge step further with multitenancy and a bunch of other enhancements (relationships, workflow, etc.) which make building business solutions on top of CRM a snap! Also, with CRM Live coming in this Spring (selected partners and customers are already running on it) the on-the-cloud offering will be there; hosted by MS! I also expect plenty of partners will be hosting their own CRM offerings on-the-cloud using the same set of bits.

Another “platform” example? SharePoint of course; one of the most successful MS products in recent years. The growth and penetration of SharePoint in all businesses spectrum is overwhelming. Lots of companies seem to have already deployed a SharePoint site or being thinking about it…what seems to be the natural step for SharePoint? Yes, you guessed right, become a platform; and in some sense.. it is already one.

I could go on forever with applications that are now being poised to be the new on-the-cloud platform.

So who you think is better positioned in the SAAS (or as we call it, Software+Services platform) world? Is not that I work here but… I honestly believe that we (MS) are. We have the technology, the talent and the determination to make things happenJ. It is exciting to be working on the edge of all this revolution and being competing with the likes of Salesforce, Google and Amazon in the services arena.

Curious note, which product “area” you think I work at MS-CRM…. yeap… “Platform” J