MrDave's (David Yack) CRM Blog!

At PDC this week Microsoft announced their new cloud service platform Azure Services Platform.  This new offering will run in the Microsoft Data Center’s featuring an O/S in the cloud plus several services sitting on top to act as building.  The goal is to provide services that can be leveraged by applications.  These can be consumed at the lowest lever using simply compute power by doing things like hosting an ASP.NET application in the cloud.  Additionally, there are building block services that site on top of the Windows Azure base and provide application developers common services they can leverage when building applications.

Examples of these services are SQL Services, Live Services and .NET Services.  .NET Services for example provides a service bus that can be leveraged to build connected applications.  By connected, I’m talking applications connected across organizations using the cloud to host the service bus. From a CRM perspective this ability to integrate as well as combine external service offerings as part of the CRM open up a lot of new opportunities. I plan to spend a decent amount of time exploring and trying to share ideas around the use of the new cloud capabilities and CRM so stay tuned!

Where it gets real exciting is when you look at what makes up the new Azure Services platform (see diagram below).  There are two building block services that I think you will find very interesting Microsoft SharePoint Services and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services.  While not available yet in the CTP of Azure that was released, these elaborate on strategy Microsoft is evolving to recognize the broader ability of both these products beyond things like simple CRM.  You will also notice CRM is on the slide twice, once as a finished service CRM Online and again as a building block service.  I believe over time we will continue to see further distinction and separation of the pure “CRM” type functions from the core capabilities the product has today that can be more broadly leveraged.  I further believe that the following is the first step by Microsoft towards making that happen.

The idea is developers will be able to use SharePoint and CRM capabilities and choose a deployment model of on-premise or in the cloud.  Let me explain that another way looking at the capabilities that both of those offer a developer.  SharePoint excels at managing and facilitating collaboration of unstructured data like documents.  It also has a slew of capabilities to make it a good portal or gateway to enterprise data  CRM on the other hand, excels at managing connected or related data where you have more structured business data like a contact or an account.  But even more important is the fact that using the same capability to relate other business data.  This could be operational data like project tracking information, or product information like a real estate property.  Regardless, we should avoid getting hung up on the CRM acronym because in reality the CRM capabilities are really a layer built on top of the CRM platform core that has much broader applicability.

By leveraging these two core products, developers are able to achieve a level of abstraction from having to compose plumbing using raw services like Workflow, SQL and such.  These services are already “glued” together when using CRM and SharePoint as the foundation.

This story is far from over, in fact in many ways I think we are just heading into a period of evolution as the new services take shape and we can think about new applications that in the past would have been considered to challenging to attempt.