Build or buy?

What is the state of custom development in SA? How far can you go with packaged software? And what is the state of development skills?

Attending an ITWeb roundtable to put their perspectives forward were: Malcolm Rabson, MD of Dariel Solutions; Steven Cohen, MD of Pastel Software; Rudi Leibbrandt, practice manager at Sybase SA; Johan Myburgh, product development director at Flowcentric; Leizl van Staden, business development manager at i5 Group; Brett Kinsey, senior manager of partners at MTN; Sandy Pullinger, MD of nFold; Tim Toussaint, business development manager for SAP SA's ISV programme; Mark Pardini, COO of Izazi; Mandla Thabo Qhobosheane, director of marketing and communications at Working Webs Consulting; Mark Oelofse, software sales manager at Sun Microsystems SA; and Mark Dorfling, business unit manager of software infrastructure at Comztek.

ITWeb: Build versus buy?

Rabson: I would say in the last six months we've come up with five major bespoke development projects; companies were looking at packages and why they should build versus buy. One of the statistics they came up with was that for every R1 they spent on licensing, they were spending R10 to R15 on consulting, maintenance and training. The other thing is some companies only need 5% of the functionality of an off-the-shelf package. Sometimes it's been far simpler to build what they need. But there are no silver bullets: if you don't do proper systems engineering, the project will fail.

Sometimes it's far simpler to build what you need.

Malcolm Rabson, MD, Dariel Solutions

Kinsey: In the mobile marketplace, there are the big companies which have a big IT staff in-house that want to do it themselves - but projects are taking longer than the clients expect. A lot of the time we can drop in some software that is 90% there but can be customised.

Leibbrandt: Most packaged applications we bring in aren't designed with the South African market in mind, so bespoke development and customisation will always be relevant here. We don't have major bandwidth for mobile applications, so there's definitely room for bespoke. The market won't disappear and we don't want it to.

Toussaint: There will always be a market for custom development. Regardless of how much functionality is in a package, there will always be some particular functions that a client wants - and that have to be custom developed. Many functions in packages like SAP started off life as custom development projects.

Pardini: One thing we find, especially with banks, is the dilemma of buy versus build, and there's a trend towards buy, depending on the business layer. What tends to happen is large customers buy for the back-end and do some limited customisation and then build their own front-end.

Pullinger: What I found recently on a project we did was that the customer could get 100% of what they needed offshore. The local providers were taking a project-based approach, which they were trying to turn into a piece of software and the customer ended up with 50% of what they wanted as opposed to 100% at a cheaper price. But they were getting it from a local supplier, which reduces your risk and increases your control.

Dorfling: Another aspect is business maturity. In some customers, their thinking is at a very low level. In a recent discussion about implementing Pastel with some customers in Africa, they were asking whether we can add certain functionality, functionality that is already built in. And they wanted to know whether they would need to get a developer in.

Getting from a local supplier reduces risk and increases control.

Sandy Pullinger, MD, nFold

Van Staden: Build becomes much more compelling when you start integrating products - IBM, SAP, Oracle, open source or whatever else your customer has.

Oelofse: There is a risk with that. We're sitting with a case now where a customer uses our content delivery system and they've done so much customisation to it that to upgrade to the next version is no longer just an upgrade; it's a major project.

Leibbrandt: It seems there's almost no difference between bespoke development and custom development - you have similar risks. Doing customisation requires the same kinds of disciplines that a development shop needs to follow to deliver a bespoke application.

Cohen: We operate in a very different sector, both at the low and high ends, and we have different versions for both. We've been forced to write software development kits for both products because 3% of our users will always require bespoke development. We used to supply some of our products with source code and invariably those were screwed up. It would work for a couple of years and almost every single time the developer would disappear. The vendor you choose is very important. Our own software has to be generic and we've always assumed there will be a development community.

Van Staden: With all the IP and knowledge sitting in organisations, we've started a second line of business with both local and global partners to encourage them to take the Microsoft boxed solution and not spend time redeveloping something that's already been done.

Leibbrandt: We supply a lot of the banks with resources and I'm struggling to find basic SQL programming experience in the market at this stage. I don't know where it's coming from but you're right - it's expensive and not very good.

Oelofse: We started an initiative because we couldn't find Java programmers in the market. We started an internship programme.

Kinsey: We have a challenge finding people who understand both the IT and cellular sides.

Leibbrandt: What we've done is run an academy programme where we take graduates and put them through a workplace experience. Even doing that; it takes a few years to acquire good IT skills. Architects don't move because they have nice jobs, but the juniors move around a lot so they can get their salaries up. That means companies sit with juniors who cost a premium but who struggle to deliver.

Rabson: I'm sure what everyone here has experienced is that we as vendors can't compete with banks or insurance companies who offer quarter-million-rand bonuses to their developers. We created our own technical test to check the quality of the CVs we got. We tested 600 people last year and about 40 passed.

Oelofse: There are a lot of training courses to study to become developers, but there aren't too many that study best practice development methodologies. There's no framework in which to work. Yes, you may be qualified in J2EE, but can you build an architecture?

It's a huge hassle finding people. It's an even bigger hassle keeping them.

Steven Cohen, MD, Pastel Software

Cohen: There's a huge hassle in finding people. There's an even bigger hassle keeping them. Everyone says salary is not important, but it's hugely important. The other problem is developers always want to be at the cutting edge. When you give the cool stuff to some people, other guys will say: "I wanted to do that so I'd rather move on." Our oldest product is still in VB 6 - how do you find people who want to use that rather than write the latest code in C#?

Pardini: You can't find the skills - it's a big problem. We have to cross-skill. We take VB programmers and skill them in other development languages. In the banks, there's an extremely high demand for SAP skills, for example. I just wonder: how many SAP implementations can South Africa support? For the newer technologies, the cool stuff, programmers are keen to get into it, but the level of skill is nothing like it was eight years ago.

Myburgh: Where are our new programmers coming from? If you find out, let us know! We've been using the universities primarily, but in the last couple of years, students with degrees have not been up to it. Some might be able to write an application, but they lack the experience to really create an enterprise-ready, scalable, extensible platform. I get the feeling not enough is being done at the grassroots level and that ISVs are then forced to poach programmers from one another. Not all vendors have the resources to start a programme and do in-house training with a mentor over a year or so.

Heading for a crisis?

Practically no one can find the skills they need at a reasonable cost, and demand for bespoke development is increasing. Derek Hughes, CEO at local development house DVT, says the reason is simple.

"A few years back, Gartner predicted 8% growth in bespoke development. This prediction was spot on, but as training has lagged, we are now paying for it."

And paying we are. Some companies report having to fork out exorbitant salaries for junior developers because they don't have a choice. And only long-term training and intern programmes will provide any sort of relief.