Are software suites a panacea for rapid IT development or not? In other words, should you continue with custom development using a pure programming language such as C# and Java or move into “Power” mode as Microsoft suggests with its Power BI & Power Apps suite of development tools, and similarly Salesforce with Appex? These business solutions are sometimes made of a set of softwares, or they were born by the development of a new custom application that has grown rapidly followed by a sprawling development such as Salesforce which today covers all business needs surrounding CRM, and more, if you consider MuleSoft. These software solutions are powerful, and they claim to greatly accelerate the software development process!
At Analystik, we have always considered it a best business practice to put your Business Intelligence into your own proprietary code; and thus, remain independent from any external control over this precious commodity. More than a development model or a working method, it is our business philosophy!
The promise of development with software suites
The big software corporations like Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce offer you to integrate their suite of software tools and develop in the language of that software tool. And their arguments are certainly worthy; namely that you will only have one supplier because there is only one IT development environment and one development tool; which tool many claims will enable much faster and less expensive software development.!
As long as the organization is able to maintain a “vanilla flavor” of the product, it usually delivers the goods quite well. However, if your business needs are more complex, with these suites of software tools, however, the development language often imposes limits on the functionality or the development and integration possibilities, which requires the use of workarounds and tricks in terms of software development. As a result, you may not get the level of optimization you are looking for in terms of the quality of the integration or the features you want to develop. And in these circumstances, being at the mercy of a single supplier becomes a disadvantage!
Moreover, in terms of business development, the company becomes totally dependent on the business vision of this supplier and its choices for the evolution of its software suite. Thus, if this supplier takes a direction of evolution for its software tool that goes against your previous investments in terms of technology, you will find yourself in an unfortunate solution where the value of your past investments will melt like snow in the sun!
The promise of custom software development
We believe that the ideal solution is like telecommuting, it lies in a hybrid mode: The commercial solution should meet the bulk of the organization’s needs while specific business needs should be met through custom development using proprietary code independent of any commercial suite.
Two of the major benefits of this hybrid mode are your independence from a given solution and a significant reduction in the risk of having to rewrite several years of custom development. Moreover, your custom software application will meet your needs perfectly, in every respect, and you will be able to develop new features at your own pace without having to wait for subsequent versions of any software suite as your needs evolve.
You will also maintain a nice independence from commercial software providers that will become more and more useful as your company grows by confining your Business Intelligence to proprietary code. You will also gain a nice independence from developers.
In addition, you will be able to recover the business intelligence created in your proprietary code for years to come when the business solution in your organization changes (technology choice, company merger, etc.).
In addition, with custom IT development, you will never again be at the mercy of a large software vendor’s business vision and the potential development and adaptation costs of subsequent versions of its software suite.
Comparative advantages of custom development and development on software suite
Custom development (with C#, for example):
Flexibility: Custom development offers great flexibility in the design and construction of the application. Every aspect of the application can be customized to meet the specific needs of the business.
Full control: Developers have full control over the development of the application, including UI rendering, the choice of technologies used and how they are integrated. This allows for the creation of custom solutions that precisely meet the needs of the business.
High performance: Custom applications tend to have better performance than applications developed on a software suite. This is because developers have complete control over how the application is designed and built, its architecture, allowing them to optimize performance.
Development with software suite (Salesforce, Microsoft, etc.):
Speed of development: Software suites offer pre-built features and tools that allow developers to reduce development time and create applications faster than starting from scratch.
Upfront cost: Suite-based development can be less expensive than custom development because developers don’t have to build every aspect of the application from scratch.
Simplified maintenance: Software suites provide regular updates and security patches, which can simplify application maintenance.
Regarding developing in a software suite environment, we contend that while all of these benefits are well founded, we must point out that experience in the banking industry has taught us that the price of vendor independence of a commercial software suite will eventually convert to a value far greater than its cost.
The fact is that software suite upgrades are generally not included in software suite subscription costs, which can lead to staggering upgrade costs not to mention the cost of collateral under-production damage incurred in the meantime by release delays. In short, this is a factor to consider when planning your development cycles.
Conclusion
In short, use the software suites to meet your standard business needs while keeping the software suite as “vanilla” as possible, and meet your specific business needs with custom code that you own and that, naturally, communicates with your software suite. Thus, in a custom development context, you will always be able to choose, to meet any specific business need, either the best software at the best price to perform an operation or the most appropriate programming language to code a function.