Commercial Applications

Evidently, considering the massive investments required and made in IT today, purchase decisions and suppliers selection must go through Finance and sometimes even through, Board of Direction. The decision of a custom software development for an application application falls under this type of investment and the weight of this responsibility is a myth, in our opinion; the 3rd myth in our series of custom software development.

Therefore, in this context of collegiality decision-making, nobody bears on its own the weight and responsibility (the shame) of decisions, sometimes dire of consequences. And this concept of shared responsibility is becoming somewhat a generalized entrepreneurial culture in Western societies, for the better and the worst. A great many thinks that the reign of commercial software reflects such an era… and entrepreneurial culture.

Tell me what motivates you…

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Of course there were horror stories with the cost of custom software development before the New Millennium, and there will be others. But since the New Millennium though, the crown of horror stories often goes to Commercial Softwares under license like Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, etc., to which many large corporations and Governments have given humongous mandates (often outrageous purchase orders).

Evidently, the vast majority of commercial softwares’ exaggerated costs and deadline overruns come from integration and personalization; services normally de facto included within the cost of custom software development mandates but which we don’t always measure accurately the impact when buying a commercial software… since everybody else has purchased it, right!

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The New Millennium has witnessed the splendid triumph of « best practices » and « quality control » concepts, in almost all fields of activities. And most of all, best pratices and quality control have come to define the true nature of Custom Software Development in particular and IT in general, Communications and Information Technologies, which have accelerated their broadcasting.

2000 à 2010 – reminder

• Web democratization, as well as Web design and programming jobs
• Communications, Sharing & Implementation of Best Practices
• Democratization of « best practices » concept in custom software development

Who defines the concept of best practices, broadcast it and why?

Expert firms such as Gartner, Forrester, KPMG, Deloitte, etc., that counsel large corporations and assess the evolution of standards within different industries to take their pulse, which is quite useful for investors and shareholders as well as for managers. It helps decision-makers to weigh their enterprise against their industries and to get to know the necessary means to keep the pace with the competition.

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To better circumcise this series of articles aiming at enlightening the myths of Custom Software Development vs Commercial Software purchase and integration, we thought it would be useful to revisit the evolution of software development.

Myths of Custom Software Development

Let’s remind us that before the turn of the New Millennium, when a company wanted to automate a process, it would have to either use internal resources or an external firm to develop its application.

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When Analystik starts a new mandate with a client; the main goal is almost always to automate a business process and the methodology is, all things considered, quite simple:

• Analysis of the process
• Analysis of possible enhancements to the process itself
• Creation of the software solution automating the process
• Integration to existing related technologies and processes
• Implementation

One spontaneously sees that a tailor-made software solution will fit more like a « glove » for the enterprise compared to a commercial software which is more of a « mitt ».

Shall we point it out over and over; although it calls upon a superior initial investment compared to a commercial software which answers roughly from 50% to 75% of requirements; a tailor-made software solution will always respond to 100% of requirements.  And let’s not forget, while adaptation to existing technologies and processes is always included with tailor-made software solution; it is always necessary as well with commercial software solution but never included !!!  We’re talking extras here; sounds like a story you’ve heard recently?

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It’s the burden of all enterprises at one point or another; we often meet with business prospects which have very precise business needs and requirements, and that are confronted with multiple options as much in terms of technology as finance, and this story unfolds itself on a landscape of functionalities and satisfaction.  Let’s put things out just the way they are: contrary tocommercial software product, custom-made development frightens a lot of people, because commercial software product is concrete to start with which is both more appealing and securing for a decision-maker.  But when you take a closer look at it, you’ll see that reality is not that simple.

We will try in this post, and as much as we can, to identify the pros and cons of both IT options: custom-made software development or commercial software product.

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hAs we mentioned in our previous post, it’s clear that, mostly for economic reasons, companies want applications that are “ready-to-mobilize”. The demand is there: 75% use standard applications and 20%, custom business applications. Further, we continued on to show that developers see positive opportunities for both options. Off-the-shelf as well as custom-made business applications…

One in the hand, is better than two in the bush

Recently however, a senior mobile developer confided to me that he had seriously considered dropping some mobile development platforms. Because customers were just not ready to absorb the costs of cross-platform development. Instead, in order to save money these clients were asking him to select THE platform (or sometimes two) with the greatest reach and potential, to evaluate the costs for it and to eliminate the others! While this is understandable, it’s not necessarily an elegant solution and very often proves problematic because there are few companies or homogeneous target audiences that use only one model of mobile device, let alone a single OS.

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Two articles on enterprise applications coming from the same publisher, businessmobile.fr, caught our attention recently. They’re interesting because they appeared less than a week apart and were in fact contradictory:

Mobility for business: complex business applications are slow to gain acceptance

In the first article based on a Forrester study, it says “the use of specific business applications is still limited and trails far behind the adoption of email or calendaring functions.”…

Hum…

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