Since the end of 2008 that we, at Agilior, decided to extend our offer in terms of professional services. We decided to include in our portfolio CRM implementations, using Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. As usual, we started our internal research, buying some books, experimenting the product, and tried some scenarios and customizations.
As we were going forward in our research, it was obvious to us that the product was extremely well featured with respect to customizations. In fact, when you install the product, you can consider that you have a CRM installation, where you can register all the interactions with your customer, help you sales team to be more productive, etc., etc. However, after knowing the product features in terms of customization, you can use the same platform to build any line of business application (LOB)! But the most powerful think about this, is that you can build the LOB application without writing almost any code. It seems that we are not alone in this reflection. In fact there is already a book named CRM as a Rapid Development Platform.
Jason Hunt and Aaron Helder, now from Ascentium, wrote an excellent article explaining why MSCRM is a business application platform. Jason and Aaron were part of the Microsoft CRM development team, and the platform was originally designed to be a development platform, and the CRM happens as sample application to manage customer relationships.
Regarding the development of any LOB application, in the article it is said that,
We‘ve found that using Microsoft CRM as your platform generally saves 50% to 70% of the development time. Effort you would have spent on the platform can be put towards the harder problem of identifying the right functionality and providing it in the right way.
I am confused, and maybe I am missing something. So, knowing that Microsoft it is extremely efficient in terms of marketing and sales, why Microsoft does not push to the masses the Dynamics CRM as a development platform? Of course that Microsoft has its internal reasons to not to do that. Sincerely, I would like to hear from Microsoft the public reason, and, let's say, the real reason.
The ecosystem has many companies which sells RAD Platforms (I will not mention names). But imagine that Microsoft starts to push Dynamics CRM as the new RAD/Agile Development Platform, maybe re-branded with a new product name. How the market will respond to this new product? What will be the future of the most of the companies that are in this market space? Do you really need a team with too many great developers?
Putting my developer hat, I must to say that what I really love to do is to craft software, and this kind of RAD development is not my first choice. However, I recognize the business benefits when adopting this kind of platform, in terms of costs, maintenance, etc.. And I must say that I am really impressed with Dynamics CRM capabilities as a development platform. I hope to see the re-brand of the platform inside Microsoft, a good marketing campaign set, a good licence scheme, and maybe, we have the tipping point of the Dynamics CRM, not as a CRM solution, but as a Business Application Development Platform.