Peter Coffee is director of platform research at Salesforce.com and will be joining me for a panel this afternoon. This morning however he led us all on a journey into platforms and the value they bring.
He gave some good examples of peak to average discrepancies that show the value of a cloud based platform. It’s incredibly hard, he said, to scale a service reliably.
Coffee defined SOA as “Software as a Service with Open Architecture” – a place where someone else does the heavy lifting of running the data centre and where metadata driven customisation is possible. It’s the next new thing in the toolkit that allows you to tie existing things together: “liberating value from your existing assets”.
When you lower the cost of a basic capability, you increase its ROI and enable further innovation because all of a sudden edge case ideas become viable as their cost structures reduce.
Coffee has drunk from the Cloud kool-aid and obviously has the salesforce barrow to push but he’s still an engaging evangelist
