Developing for the CRM Cloud: ISVs Weigh Investments in Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Microsoft Dynamics CRM/xRM or Salesforce.com's Force.com - if you're an ISV, which platform should you use as the foundation for creating business applications?

Both technologies provide multi-tenancy so ISVs can easily build applications that support as many customers as they can handle. And Microsoft and Salesforce each provide an online marketplace to help ISVs sell their applications and to enable enterprises to find the applications they need.

But which technology is really the better choice for developers?

"It comes down to the religion of the developer and my understanding is there isn't an advantage of one over the other," says Leon Tribe, a Dynamics CRM consultant, MVP, and blogger based in Sydney, Australia who has devoted several recent blog posts to the competitive dynamic between Salesforce.com and Dynamics CRM. "For developers developing external applications that plug into the CRM system it probably makes sense to develop for both because you're reaching a broader audience. But if you're developing [core product customizations for one CRM solution] it would be much harder because you wouldn't be able to recycle your code. But if it's an external application hooking through to the back-end data store that wouldn't be so hard to achieve."

From a software vendor's perspective, getting locked in to an application platform is a serious consideration.

"When you put your development resources into either Force.com or xRM one of the potential issues is you're going to limit yourself from a marketing automation ...