Enterprise Software Success Myth #8
Doug Hadden, VP Products
FreeBalance is a medium-sized Independent Software Vendor (ISV) with considerable success competing against very large Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) vendors. We are sharing 16 lessons learned by bucking conventional wisdom to encourage industry innovation and creativity.
Conventional View
Many organizations believe that the best approach to avoid risk is to acquire “tried and proven” technology solutions from the largest vendors.
Symptoms
Technology changes rapidly. So-called “proven” solutions often leverage outdated or legacy technology. This reduces the useful lifespan for enterprise software. In the course of avoiding risk, the organization has introduced more risk.
Emerging Trends
- The largest enterprise software vendors continue to sell web-enabled software solutions based on legacy and proprietary client/server code.
- Emergence of cloud computing, social software and new devices promises significant improvements in productivity and effectiveness than cannot be achieved with older technology
- Use of agile techniques to more rapidly test new technology ideas while reducing investment
- Disruption of the software middleware market by open source software that provides more choice, more openness for integration and frequently more robust technology that enterprise equivalents
- Emergence of Web Services standards to enable integration among software applications from different manufacturers
- Use of risk management techniques to mitigate risk in IT projects including risk identification, analysis, response planning, monitoring and control are in more use. Organizations are beginning to recognize the risks that are implicit in any enterprise software implementation.
FreeBalance Approach
- Use of Web-Services and Service-Oriented Architecture to enable interoperability and compatibility with numerous sub-systems including granular integration
- Web-native multi-tier architecture with no legacy code to support technology change and choice in the future including cloud computing and shared services support
- Choice of deploying open source or commercial middleware