Microsoft's software + Services - Discussion between Gianpaolo and Phil

I have great respect for both Phil and Gianpaolo, most of my understanding of the SaaS market and the architecture principles come from their posts. I was following the discussion that was happening between Phil and Gianpaolo on Microsoft's strategy on S+S, in this post i have covered my perspective on this discussion.

I accept with Gianpaolo that what is required for the Office custmers is not hosted office, but services that would help them to collaborate. In one of my previous post on office 2.0 i had discussed a similar view on this topic.

Ofcourse, we cannot take a similar argument for large enterprise applications, which require huge cost for setting up and running the software, which is why SaaS came into existance. I think a strategy involving a Managed Appliance (software) and Services would work well for Enterprise Apps. Staying connected with in the customer's network through an appliance strategy will create huge potential to deliver multiple network based services to the enterprises.

Microsoft's Multitenant CRM Offering

Recently there was a news from Microsoft on their new Multi-tenant CRM offering, which is planned to be released sometime in the middle of 2007. It is one of the most breaking news in the world of SaaS. It was considered that it would be difficult for Incumbent enterprise software vendors to break into the world of Multi-tenancy and build a solution that's scalable like a true net-native SaaS vendor. By releasing a true Multi-tenant offering Microsoft has broken the presumption. Also, the way they have opened up the software for its partner is again very interesting, it has shown a clear way of how partners can make money. We need to wait and find out how this new partner hosted deployment model would fare and how will Microsoft position Dynamics as an alternative CRM platform competing against salesforce.com's Appexchange.