The Death Of Custom Software

By Author: Sukumar Jena
Total Articles: 2
Comment this article

CIOs now demand that internal IT software be designed like software products
By Rich Napoli, COO, OFS

The custom software you wrote for your own firm had only to meet your company’s unique requirements. For example, if your company only did business in the US, the software you built only had to deal in US dollars and to show screens in English. Product software made by a commercial software company, by comparison, was designed and built to work in multiple languages and currencies, with multiple options and configuration settings to accommodate the thousands of different companies that might one day use their product. So building product software used to be more complicated and involved than building custom software but that is no longer the case today. Increasingly today, IT organizations have to view their own internally-developed software with the same eye towards productization as commercial software firms. Why the change? And what is prompting it?
We have found that many of our large IT customers are now facing many of the same challenges that our software product customers have ...
... been dealing with for years:
· Building a Product Roadmap
· Planning a Release
· Software Build Management
· Regression Testing
· Multi-Tenancy
With all these new challenges, IT organizations are increasingly blurring the line between custom software and product software, thinking of themselves more as software vendors that design, build and test software for their corporation’s departments around the world. The old methods of building custom software no longer work in today’s modern, distributed economy. Increasingly IT organizations must think like software product firms in order to compete with effective solutions that work around the globe in different working environments. In order to make sure that they are adopting the most advanced product development principles, IT organizations should turn to experienced product development firms such OFS, which has a 15-year history of building commercial software for independent software.
Join our upcoming webinar presented by OFS’ Rich Napoli and guest speaker, Forrester Research Inc’s Michael Facemire on a informative free webinar on 9th May 2013 and learn how to build your internal software to meet today’s challenges! For Register this webinar click here. Don’t miss it!!