A promise in the box software
Some years ago the SaaS revolution began. The main promise was “no software” (by Salesforce, the anti-Oracle of these days). You don’t need software, you can just use Software as a Service when and if it’s needed. So no need for an IT department, expensive implementations, etc. You can just buy software as any other product.
It has been and still is quite a cool idea. You outsource things that aren’t part of your core business, right? You outsource accounting, office cleaning…
But in the meantime, one thing has changed.
Digital Transformation
The Digital Transformation has started and changed multiple industries. We have digitized banking, insurance, travel, retail, etc. So… for the majority of companies, IT is now (or should be) a core business. How would you build your unique selling proposition using out of the box solutions?
Another small revolution has also happened. Agile Software development has allowed us to create software much faster, and more flexibly.
Traps in ready-to-use software
I see more and more real cases when buying off-the-shelf solutions isn’t cheaper. You are buying something which is 80% of what you need, but then it occurs that it doesn’t match the details of your business requirements. You try to fix it and then you discover that you can’t modify it or every modification increase the costs exponentially. Some companies find it easier to adjust processes to software. That’s not the point. With bad software, you lose your time and you lose team productivity.
Develop software that you need
What I see in the future is – small teams that are open-minded. They choose to buy a single software component instead of a box software, and then build unique solutions on top of these components. This is GitHub Generation. These are the people who first check what is already on the market and aren’t afraid of reusing and re-building the code.
After all, many industries build upon ready-to-use components – software is no different here. Using components allow us to build a solution base smarter and faster. We gain extra time for developing custom solutions for the explicit business case.
Open source initiatives are another great opportunity. These are highly cooperative small teams, spread across the world, specialized in one type of functionality like loyalty for eCommerce or progressive web apps (disclaimer – these two are our projects). They react fast to the market demands and propose innovative solutions.
Using existing frameworks, IT departments can easily apply them to your business and adjust them to create a unique value proposition for your customers.
The future lies in development
We have seen rapidly growing demand for our framework for building loyalty programs. This is a good example of the larger trend. IT departments use our components to deliver faster, but they are still in charge of the project and are able to fill all business needs.
In the future, building your own software will be even faster and cheaper, and we will see more and more companies building software as their core business.
Published June 7, 2018
