"CRM Live", here it comes..

I am very excited that CRM team can finally share the vision and thinking around live services with our partners and customers. Today, Steve Ballmer, our CEO, has announced CRM Live, a new live service from Microsoft that will be delivering outstanding CRM services as part of our Software-As-A-Service vision.

CRM Live will deliver “instant-on” CRM solution to our customers while providing “unlimited and infinite” opportunities for our partners to add value to the offering through customization and services-in-the-cloud application building. This is a big step towards a service oriented world where low cost services in the cloud provide seamless mashup and application integration experience to provide value add to the next generation of business applications.

Once I have calmed down from the excitement of the announcement, I will write more on the partner opportunity, specifically programmability and extensibility opportunities. I know it is a new software model for many of our partners and there are tons of questions out there but believe me, CRM Live it Excellent news for both customers, partners and ISV.