Microsoft And Salesforce: Very Different Views Of The Cloud

Last week, at its Professional Developer Conference, Microsoft debuted its long-awaited Windows Azure development platform for building cloud-based applications. In something of a surprise, David Thompson, corporate vice president of Microsoft Online, said the company would eventually move all its enterprise software into the cloud.

Salesforce, which modestly calls itself "The enterprise cloud computing company," this week announced its Force.com for Amazon Web Services development tools that businesses, ISVs and solution providers use to build cloud applications that leverage Force.com's database, logic and user interface and the storage and compute capabilities of Amazon's S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service) and EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) cloud-computing services. (Force.com is Salesforce's platform-as-a-service system.) Salesforce made the announcement at its annual Dreamforce user conference.

The announcements by Microsoft and Salesforce come on the heels of IBM's announcements last month that it's making more of its applications, like Lotus Notes and the Bluehouse social networking software, available through its cloud-computing initiative. But while IBM is making its applications available "in the cloud," what Microsoft and Salesforce are doing is giving solution providers a way to build applications that leverage cloud-computing platforms.

While solution providers were surprised by Microsoft's stated intention to eventually offer all its enterprise applications online, the company's cloud-computing plans remain very Microsoft-centric. One solution provider executive told ChannelWeb that Microsoft is looking at a real stack of technologies, not just putting some token software online. But the point is, it remains a Microsoft stack.

That's fine if you are a solution provider that's already closely tied to Microsoft's technologies. But part of the cloud-computing concept is that solution providers and their customers are freed from the tyranny of vendor lock-in. What appears at first glance to represent a major shift in Microsoft's strategy is really just an expansion of the ways the vendor delivers its products.

Salesforce is hardly neutral in this case. The company's ambition is to be the development platform for cloud computing. But unlike Microsoft, Salesforce's approach is to let solution providers leverage technology from other vendors -- in this case Amazon Web Services -- through the Force.com Toolkit for AWS.

From the channel perspective, it will be interesting to see which approach wins out.