The business application market has undergone enormous changes in terms of consolidation and technical advances in the past few years and we can expect even more transformation in the near future. Whether these shifts in the industry are good for customers or not, still remains to be seen, but one certainty is that companies will have an even greater need of applications that assist in running and growing their businesses as competition increases both locally and internationally.
In the past, businesses selected best-of-breed solutions from a variety of vendors to best suite the needs of specific sectors of their organisations. This led to a heterogeneous infrastructure in which every division had the software it wanted, but integration and data sharing was difficult. With the structure of today's market, many have decided to standardise on one software suite from one supplier in an effort to ease integration as well as sharing and collaboration. Opting for the one-vendor approach, however, locks users into the vendor's workflow and best practices.
"Unfortunately, whichever one of the above options is chosen, the value added by the software is limited by the fact that every installation is the same," says Kelvin Reynolds, executive director, enterprise software solutions at ITQ, a subsidiary of Simeka BSG. "To gain value from software (apart from the applications every business needs, such as accounting), companies need to incorporate their own unique business processes into their applications to ensure their systems keep them ahead of the competition.
"There are two choices in this respect: customise or develop bespoke add-ons for the applications. Customisation is the popular choice as it seems the most convenient option, while bespoke development is viewed in a less positive light. The reality, in fact, is the opposite."
An issue with customising business applications is that the changes are not necessarily permanent. When vendors release an upgrade, the changes may no longer work as desired, requiring extensive work to confirm or update the existing code.
Bespoke add-ons, on the other hand, make incorporating unique features simpler - working on the assumption that both the business application and the add-ons are built according to industry standards. Using standards, vendors are able to upgrade their systems as they see fit, without disrupting the operation of the add-ons.
"The need for add-ons is clear when examining business intelligence (BI) as an example," continues Reynolds. "ERP vendors have been promising to incorporate BI functionality for years, but have never been able to deliver. This lack of delivery is not the result of too little effort, but rather the fact that packaging BI functionality to meet the intelligence needs of all customers is near impossible.
"Certain queries, reports and data sets will be useful to a broad section of the user base, but who can tell what a CEO or department head will require in different business circumstances. The BI needs of businesses are therefore still addressed by third parties that provide all manner of templates, but also the ability to slice and dice as the user requires."
When considering the high costs of implementing and maintaining business applications, selecting systems that, at best, only put your business on par with the competition is not a decision to be proud of. To compete effectively today, companies need to ensure their software plays its role in differentiating them from the crowd and acting as a business enabler instead of a business hindrance.
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