Two facts play against custom software development:
- The market is full of comprehensive software solutions such as Oracle, SAP, IBM, Salesforce, etc.
- Horror stories are on the side of major software development projects
Considering these facts, over the years companies have chosen to install commercial software solutions (CRM, ERP, accounting software, loan management system, etc.) instead of custom software development. And in many cases, they replaced a “home” application whose technology was obsolete.
Of course, a lot of time and effort has gone into tailoring these business solutions to “your” reality to turn into customized solutions that really meet your needs. If you encounter one of the two situations below, rest assured, you are not the only one in this situation:
- You have different systems that do not talk to each other
- You still have specific business needs that are not met by your commercial software solutions
The need for Custom Software Development
You may have found it difficult to develop features within the environment of your current software suite. Otherwise, you may have been put off when estimating the costs of customizing certain features to meet specific needs.
Better, you may have adapted your software solution to meet your business needs and the cost of rewriting these adaptations allowing you to upgrade to the latest version of your vendor’s software solution have put you off.
Still, your needs are not all met, and your users or customers are not completely satisfied with your suite of applications.
These may be features or services that would be too expensive to develop in the environment of your software suite, features or services that simply can not be developed in your software suite environment or services or features that you want independent of this environment. We all know the limitations in customization of large software suites and especially the constraints they impose subsequently in terms of evolution and updates.
There are a number of reasons why you might consider tailor-made development in parallel with the development of your software suite, the fact is that custom development still has its place in IT today, if only for the Agility it allows against the constraints imposed by the commercial software suites.
ROI at the heart of Custom Software Development
In a custom development, the developer can focus exclusively on the business process, the features or services to be developed. But he can also, advise you and help you identify the feature or service that offers the best ROI for your goals.
The architecture of solutions has evolved over time, today to obtain an “integrated” solution it is no longer necessary to develop everything within a given solution. For example, a multi-layered architecture will “call” an API to respond to a specific feature. So, in a feature that your developer needs to develop, a payment must be made by the customer. Your developer will have the task, not to develop this sub-feature, but to find the right API or existing service that best responds to your requirements and, use or rent or buy it…
The reason is simple, custom development is not related to the constraints of your software suite such as technology.
In short, with custom development, you can align with your goals rather than the code or environment of your software suite. This allows you to put time and budget on what offers a real return on investment (ROI), the most profitable feature or service, offering a real competitive advantage.
The performance promise of Custom Software Development
On the other hand, in custom development, and since we are not bound by the constraints of our clients’ software suite, it seems to us more profitable for us as for our customers to develop with the latest technologies and the best environment in relation to the objectives.
In this sense, custom development includes an intrinsic promise of performance.
Custom Software Development Tips
Finally, do not ignore the role of your development firm to measure and neglect its contribution to the quality of your development project.
The particularity of custom development is to adapt to any environment or software suite. From there, it can be said that custom development specialists become specialists in integration.
Thus, your Consultant or Developer will most likely have the experience of your software suite and will be able to identify future development challenges and integrate more quickly with your software suite.
As an indication, Analystik knows and can execute integration with the two leading CRMs on the market, Dynamics and Salesforce. In the same way, we could guide you in the evaluation of these two commercial softwares, direct you towards the solution best adapted to your needs and ensure a customized development best adapted to this environment.
Conclusion
Will Custom Development still have its place in 2020?
More than ever, considering that it is often more expensive and more difficult to evolve developments made in a software suite environment, not to mention that it will impose its technology … which is not always up-to-date!
Add to that, the frenzy of the Web that boasted still just yesterday simplicity all-round while in many cases, we arrived at an opposite result with browser incompatibilities, security problems, interface problems, etc.
So, yes, to have on hand, a good consultant with a professional custom software development team knowing the latest technology and which is not bound by any constraints … it’s surely worth its weight in gold!