Is Microsoft making a serious play for Salesforce's crown with Power Apps and new Dynamics 2016 features?

'Salesforce are a partner from our perspective' swears Microsoft

Microsoft announced a series of products and services along the themes of "business change" today.

These included an enterprise app development environment called Power Apps, new features for Dynamics CRM 2016, and a series of Skype-based enhancements for Office 365, all revealed at its Convergence 2015 conference in Barcelona today.

But what's the real intention between revealing such Salesforce-baiting items while smiling sweetly and saying the two companies are still "partners... from our perspective?"

Skype for Business, Microsoft CMO Chris Capossela admitted, has long been suspiciously viewed as a "rebranded Lync" - but no more. It will now include better support for PSTN (Public Switch Telephone Network - i.e. old analogue telephones, in the style of Cisco's WebEx and others), and with general improvements, he promised, it will now no longer take the apparent "12 minutes" it used to take to successfully set up a Skype meeting.

Dynamics CRM 2016, meanwhile, will make better use of Azure for "machine learning models", which will include personalised up-selling algorithms tailored to individual customers as well as, perhaps more importantly, full offline capabilities for an increasingly tablet- and phone-sporting mobile sales workforce.

"It's not just a sales tool, it's an intelligent customer engagement tool," enthused Capossela.

But it was Power Apps that caused the biggest buzz today, as Microsoft revealed that the enterprise app development suite will offer "built-in data connections to SaaS services like Office 365, Dynamics, Salesforce, Dropbox and OneDrive" as well as SharePoint, SQL Server, Oracle, SAP "and more".

Using such simple ideas as logic flows with "If then" gates, and intelligent abilities such as drawing relevant image files from the user's system to help present the app, Power Apps is designed to make it much easier to create compelling apps.

But don't some of these ideas for pulling together customer engagement strands all seem a bit Salesforce? After all, wrapping CRM service capability into apps is something that can already be done using Force.com or, to a lesser extent, mobile app wrapper Salesforce1.

Computing asked Nicole Herskowitz, senior director at Microsoft, who had just demoed Power Apps on stage, whether or not she considered Power Apps to be a direct play for Force.com's customer base.

"As you can see, [Salesforce] are a partner from our perspective, where their data is important and can help solve a set of problems that their customers have today as well, which is not just Salesforce data but looking at other data too when building applications," said Herskowitz.

"So in many ways they get to reach more customers with our offerings."

But wouldn't Salesforce be happier if customers used Salesforce tools and technology to solve these problems?

"Yeah, well Microsoft and - I think a lot of companies in general - are noticing that our customers want choice, and we just want to give them a way to have that choice," said Herskowitz.

"And so while there's a world where everybody wants to be on one stack, I think the reality is that's not what customers are asking for."

Herskowitz said that "in many cases" Microsoft is "a closer partner with Salesforce".

"We sell a CRM solution, but we also talk about Salesforce at our events," she stated.

"We'd always love people to use a Windows device, but we're still going to run Office on Apple devices, or on anything. So I think more and more it's about customers.

"We have the largest enterprise customer base and we're opening a lot of doors with them. So it's a good thing for everyone," said Herskowitz.

Alexandros Stratis, an enterprise applications research analyst at IDC, was a little more prepared to follow Computing's logic, however.

Stratis agreed that what Microsoft has done could be interpreted as "leveraging the infrastructure" it has that Salesforce can't necessarily match.

"This is a company that has Azure and a lot of platforms and capacity in other fields, as well as the brand name, so in trying to leverage this capability, they can go after other kinds of ERP software," Stratis told Computing.

But Stratis believes this could be a long time coming. This may well be true, given that Herskowitz gave no release date for Power Apps, telling the assembled press that Microsoft would continue experimenting with it to find new ways to make it relevant for customers.

Perhaps a little like Windows 10, which only this time last year OS lead Joe Belfiore told Computing was "a house renovation project" that would always depend on user feedback, Power Apps is still merely an idea tossed out to the masses to see what they make of it.

"I don't think it's exactly what it needs to be yet," agreed Stratis, "but it could be an indication of what they mean to do."