Coming Full Circle Back To Custom Applications

As with all technology cycles, we are in for a reversal. The trend of buying packaged applications has been very strong for the last decade +, but is about to change directions. I predict (yes you can quote me) that over the next 24 months (possibly 36 months) we will see a new shift towards enterprise application development.

There are a few forces driving this shift:

1. Labor is less expensive - with off-shore development there are large groups of developers that are available to do application coding at a low cost (no duh comments on this one - I realize that off-shore development has been going on for quite some time).
2. The core functionality stack is already in-place - in most organizations, the large functional components (ERP, SCM, MRO, CRM, etc.) already exist. Still the complex differentiation requirements of modern businesses are not met by these packages. There is a need to extend and expand functionality to pull ahead of the pack.
3. 80% foundations exist already - this final factor is probably the most important. In the past, companies had to build complete solutions from scratch. Today they have a major advantage. With open source solutions available in almost every category, and with the components (web server, reporting, database, etc.) available for free, significant portions of solutions already exist pre-built. Customizing the functionality (which is never trivial) is all that remains.

So, if you are an in IT or are a corporate business user rejoice and celebrate the new opportunities......maybe; there is a reason that SAP, Oracle and the others seemed so inviting that you were willing to pay millions.