When Web Services as we know them today were in their infancy I started to work with a customer that sold a market leading product.  Their product was successful because of the rich supporting data source that helped their clients make intelligent decisions.  But another differentiator was the willingness of the product supplier to customise the product to meet their clients specific requirements.  Whilst this delivered enhanced value to the client and led to easier integration into existing processes, it increased both cost and delivery timescales for the product supplier.  The level of customisation also created other issues including complicating maintenance and versioning.

So, the product supplier decided to take a service based approach.  This involved identifying the different capabilities of the existing monolithic product, extracting them and creating a service for each.  When the entire product functionality could be delivered by a collection of services, the services were orchestrated back together to in essence deliver the same capabilities of the original monolithic product.

Of course this approach led to a much more agile approach to customisation, which cost less and could be delivered in a more timely manner.  But what was both fascinating and unexpected, was the realisation that the smaller granular capabilities delivered by the services were of interest to a broader spectrum of customers within new industry sectors.

So by taking a service based approach the product supplier not only increased its agility and reduced costs, it also increased the applicability of its product to new markets.

Simon Thurman

So another blog for you to read and comment on, well I hope it’s not just another one, but something different, I’m sure you will let us know!

 I work at Microsoft UK and lead a business development team within the Developer & Platform Evangelism (DPE) Group.  DPE is all about looking to the future in both how software developers will innovate and develop new applications as well as the future of how platform technologies can be used to solve tomorrows business challenges.  Our team focuses on driving new technology adoption projects with a variety of customers.  Our goal is to create business value through emerging technologies, create new channels to market  for our customers and produce evidence to share and promote that value to a wider community. 

 It’s a small team, but generally we cover a wide variety of customers from small, emerging start-ups to high profile household names.  It was our observation that during this journey where we interact with customers and explore exciting new ways to use technology, that the experiences and learning we gain might be interesting to a wider community.  Wouldn’t it be great to share the stories and impact that we believe technology is having and drive some discussion on the value and perceptions from a wider audience!

In my next post I'll do a "who's who" of the team.

Cheers,

Mark Stewart