THE BENEfITS Of ApplICATION plATfORM TECHNOlOGIES

The benefits of application
platform technologies
When it comes to achieving the right software solution for the business, the build versus buy argument has
been raging for decades. But as the financial climate puts ever greater pressure on organisations to improve
business agility, neither offers a viable solution. Haseet Sanghrajka, Managing Director of ST Consulting,
outlines the opportunities presented by application platform technologies.
Businesses frequently can not afford to
incur the cost of bespoke development
yet the inflexibility of a packaged
solution will constrain business
change. Instead, growing numbers
of organisations are considering the
possible benefits of application platform
technologies that promise to deliver
custom solutions at the price point and
timeframe of a packaged alternative.
Chasing agility
In today’s economic marketplace, business
agility is key to sustaining success.
Whether it is to enable process change to
improve efficiency and drive down costs
or to rapidly exploit an emerging market
opportunity, business leaders need to be
able to innovate, fast.
Yet how many organisations, especially
in the SME sector, are discovering that
bold plans for business change are
stymied by the constraints of the IT
infrastructure? With limited budgets and
resources, organisations are struggling
to achieve the changes required to
speed up business innovation.
How many have discovered that an
inflexible packaged software solution
cannot deliver the process change or
essential information resources required
to support entrance into a new market?
Or that a lack of available IT resource will
mean the organisation has to wait weeks,
even months, for even minor software
changes to be made?
This is nothing new – attempting to
customise a package or building bespoke
software from scratch has always been a
challenging and often expensive exercise.
The problem now is that organisations
need the IT infrastructure to be far more
responsive to new operational demands;
yet, having pared investments down to
the bone, there is no money to afford the
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APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT
consultancy and software development
expertise required to deliver the right
solution in a decent timeframe.
Build or buy
So what are the options? In an ideal world,
organisations would opt to build bespoke
software every time. The solution is
tailored to meet exact business needs and
it is easier to attain a technology platform
that works seamlessly with the existing
infrastructure. Unfortunately there is a
massive price tag attached and there is
likely to be several months of designing,
coding and testing – time that most
modern, agile businesses can ill-afford.
It will always cost businesses more to
develop a particular functionality from
scratch than to purchase comparable
functionality within a packaged
solution. As a result, for the majority
of organisations, the costs and risks
associated with developing highly
specialised line of business (LOB)
applications are truly prohibitive.
Yet packaged solutions, while less expensive
and theoretically quicker to deploy than
bespoke developed solutions, might not fit
the business and can be very difficult to
change once in place. Operational processes
typically have to be changed to reflect the
design of the software and users need
constant additional training to help them
move between solutions designed to work
very differently.
Furthermore, each time a new LOB solution
is required, an organisation will end up with
another set of underlying technologies and
a complex, expensive integration challenge.
Add in the costs associated with managing
many vendor relationships and introducing
yet another solution to the user base, and
the incremental costs of these packaged
solutions are significant.
Impossible? Maybe not, as this is the
promise of application platforms,
such as Microsoft Dynamics xRM,
which are designed to accelerate the
development of relational business (or
LOB) applications. xRM builds on the
Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform to
deliver any relationship management
based LOB solution, from resource
management to patient management.
The speed of development is achieved
through the use of reusable application
services, that can be adapted and
extended to create many unique
applications and, in the case of Microsoft,
standard technology building blocks that
are already in use such as .NET, Microsoft
Outlook and Office.
With a multi-tenanted architecture,
organisations can build and run many
LOB applications on a single platform.
This creates a far more coherent
IT infrastructure and offers users a
consistent application feel that minimises
the training overhead.
Unlike traditional bespoke development
that relies on software coders,
application platform technology allows
organisations to build on the underlying
relational database using point and click
development tools. Key concepts such as
database fields, data relationships and
workflow are automatically handled by the
underlying application platform layer.
This enables an organisation to rapidly
develop skills to create their own LOB
applications in response to business
demands and deliver the required solution.
Indeed, it is estimated that an organisation
can create a new solution from scratch in
the same timeframe it takes to deploy a
traditional packaged application.
Conclusion
Organisations are facing a tough challenge
with pressure to achieve unprecedented
levels of business agility countered by
the continued freeze on either capital
expenditure or development budgets.
The rapid development opportunities
of application platforms solutions have
significant appeal on many levels;
from the convergence of disparate,
standalone LOB applications and
systems into an integrated, unified
application platform to the speed with
which new solutions can be delivered to
meet highly specific business needs.
Perhaps it should be no surprise,
therefore, that, according to Forrester
Research, approximately 75 per cent of IT
leaders globally anticipate a shift towards
application platforms. The writing is,
finally, on the wall for traditional, slow, old
fashioned software development.
About the author
Haseet Sanghrajka is the Managing
Director of ST Consulting, a financial
systems and CRM specialist providing
complete, end-to-end systems and
supporting services for small and mediumsized enterprises (SME). ST Consulting
provides Microsoft Dynamics GP and
Microsoft Dynamics CRM systems to a
broad range of vertical markets and is also
a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.
The return on investment from either
bespoke or packaged software can
therefore be disappointing – while the
business is still struggling to achieve its
strategic innovation objectives.
Achieving innovation
Nirvana, of course, would be a packaged
solution that could be rapidly customised
to meet an organisation’s specific
requirements without compromising the
ongoing upgrade path, delivering the exact
functionality requirements of the business
and without the price tag associated with
traditional bespoke development.
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