With a bit of surprise, Roberto Andreoli today has published on his blog a post about one of the topic that I'll try to demonstrate during the next weeks for who has the fortune :P to be present at the next events organized by my company (I'll talk about these events later).
The question is: Has Microsoft the chance to be the leader in the Business Application world in the near future? Is the Microsoft platform ready for this step?
Roberto has published exactly what I'll try to explain (and demonstrate) the next week:
"Microsoft with Dynamics and the OBA (Office Business Applications) is the only company that can provide a complete coverage of Structured and Unstructured activities/processes. We cannot suggest to our customers to use monolithic applications, today the paradigm is completely changed. Instead of a monolithic approach we need to design flexible applications with an high level of interoperability with existing systems, there is no just one product that can cover all customer needs. We should provide to our customers solid Business Capabilities with an Innovative Technology that can put these capabilities together to create a solutions that fit the customer needs!
Microsoft is following the right way. Try to see the following picture (it is just an example):
The picture above is just a simple example on how Microsoft can cover customer needs to create a business application. We have the Base Services, the Base Capabilities and all the Microsoft products are based on the same platform stack. We have a strong EAI infrastructure that provides the right level of interoperability with existing systems. We have the Core Business Capabilities and through MOSS we can provide Collaboration services. Last but not list, we have just one Dev Platform and with Visual Studio we are able to customize and adapt all our solutions to customer processes."
This is the key point of the possible success I think: Microsoft now has a complete platform with products totally integrated and "mixable" to satisfy every user needs, based on a common core platform: .NET. Actually I can't see any platform that is more adaptable to the customer's business needs like the Microsoft's ones.
I'll talk about this topic more in the next days, but for the moment (and thanks to Roberto) please reflect about what you can read here...
Technorati Tag:
Dynamics CRM,
OBA