X
Business

Microsoft’s Platform as a Service Plans: Putting the Pieces Together

Microsoft is getting into the platform as a service (PaaS) market, and doing so in a rather major, though stealthy way. It’s no secret that the company’s Software+Services strategy has a lot of PaaS capabilities, but putting together information from announcements and briefings at this week’s Dynamics Convergence conference, as well as a previous Office developer’s conference, reveals what looks like a very strong and impressive set of initiatives.
Written by Joshua Greenbaum, Contributor

Microsoft is getting into the platform as a service (PaaS) market, and doing so in a rather major, though stealthy way. It’s no secret that the company’s Software+Services strategy has a lot of PaaS capabilities, but putting together information from announcements and briefings at this week’s Dynamics Convergence conference, as well as a previous Office developer’s conference, reveals what looks like a very strong and impressive set of initiatives.

Microsoft is being a bit stealthy about pulling all its different offerings together into a concerted PaaS effort partly because the leading proponents inside the company are being a little conservative about how much they want to promote at this time. This conservatism is certainly in contrast to Salesforce.com’s almost excessive promotion of a PaaS capability that, in my mind, doesn’t even come close to what Microsoft is cooking up.

The other reason Microsoft is being a little stealthy about how it goes to market in PaaS is that there is still a fair amount of disconnect between the platform and Office sides and the Dynamics group: the former is pushing cloud formations of tools and generic “system services” like SQL Server, Sharepoint, Biztalk, Exchange, and the like, while the latter just announced the beginnings of a wave of applications-level services that will be hostable in the cloud and accessible through the same common development environments that underlie the rest of the Software+Services strategy. Though there is a common strategy, there seems to be no one to really stand up and articulate it: Stephen Elop, are you listening?

The services that are available in the cloud from the Dynamics side of the house are what are slated to make S+S an impressive PaaS offering, starting with hostable services from the major ERP offerings – AX and NAV in particular – as well as the CRM Live functionality that is slated to hit GA later this year.

Equally as interesting are the first of several new horizontal services that Dynamics is planning to offer in the cloud. The initial releases are a service that lets Dynamics customers automatically sell their excess inventory on Ebay, a payment processing service, and a search marketing service. But the plan for the next couple of years, which was shown to analysts under NDA, reveals a wide range of generic services that offer capabilities common to a broad range of industries and are well-positioned to leverage the existing services in NAV, AX, and CRM that will also be hostable in the cloud.

What this further refinement to Microsoft’s cloud computing strategy shows is a growing set of business processes that can be added to the more generic systems-level services that have been highlighted as part of the S+S campaign. This makes for a powerful five-prong thrust into cloud computing that I think will become a major contender in the next year or so. The five prongs are:

• Standard Microsoft develop and deploy tools that can target hybrid cloud and on-premise applications, well-known to millions of developers • The Microsoft system software stack, available in the cloud or on-premise • Office Business Applications (OBA), that can be deployed on premise or in the cloud, utilizing back-end services that are also available on-premise or in the cloud. • Emerging Dynamics services, like Ebay and payment processing • Existing AX and NAV services, now made hostable as well

This is in my mind a pretty comprehensive pallet for building applications that can exist in a hybrid on-premise and cloud model, and can be moved freely between the two deployment modes pretty much at will. It’s a far cry from the relatively limited capabilities of Salesforce.com’s Force.com today, and into the foreseeable future as well.

How extensive will this effort be? One of the more cautious members of the Dynamics team told me it will take a few years to get all of these moving parts to play nicely, but I think he’s being a little too conservative. From what I’ve heard about things like XRM, customer-built CRM-like applications that use Microsoft CRM as a development platform, as well as some of the functionality coming from the OBA and platform people, and the data center construction plans at Microsoft that are measured in kilowatts, Microsoft-in-the-cloud is already happening… well, this strategy is already happening, albeit without as focused a message as it probably deserves.

And wait until Yahoo gets added to the mix…..

Editorial standards