White Paper: Information Workplace Platforms: Oracle vs. Microsoft
There are business scenarios in which technology-selection decisions should be based on vendor platforms and there are other cases in which such decisions should focus on discrete applications. While the term “platform” has no precise, universally-accepted definition, there certainly does exist a spectrum of complexity among software applications that ranges from simple, quick solutions to small-scale (often departmental), tactical problems to highly complex, long-term, mission-critical (usually enterprise-wide) solutions to strategic problems. We will use “point solution” to refer to the simpler extreme within this spectrum and “platform” to refer to the more complex extreme.