Custom Application Development vs Ready to Use Solutions

Mainly large multinational corporations invest in custom application development, which is considered as more expensive than implementation of ready to use solutions widely utilized by small and medium sized enterprises. Nevertheless, small and medium sized businesses also take advantage of custom-made software, mainly dealing with enterprise-specific business processes and procedures that are not incorporated as best practices in ready to implement software products.

Usually, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system would feature built-in best practices applied within the respective industry; however, a ready to use solution is not expected to cover procedures and business processes that are utilized only within a particular enterprise. The same applies, largely, also to customer relationship management (CRM) systems that are widespread among businesses within a variety of industries. In contrast, home users usually rely on software applications that are product of generic software product development.

Therefore, a large part of business require custom software at a certain stage of their development, which is now a more affordable option due to the growing reliability of products developed through outsourcing, mainly in India and other countries in Asia. Eastern Europe is also emerging as an offshoring center for software development along with a number of countries in Central and South America.

On the other hand, contemporary business software solutions are highly configurable, or, in other words, business software can fit a wide range of needs and requirements. Nevertheless, configurability does not provide a universal solution, thus customization is largely used when ready to use software is not applicable. Software vendors in developing nations like India gradually matured and are now able to offer fully functional business software at extremely competitive prices. Those countries produce large number of well-educated software experts experienced not only in managing software development but also able to tailor software to produce a best fit.

Actually, custom applications are used everywhere, replacing old-fashioned spreadsheet solutions that have been widespread for decades. Both generic and custom-made software, however, are undergoing a process of massive transformation caused by the emergence of new technologies, utilizing to the utmost the online capabilities of modern hardware and software.

Software-as- a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) are relatively new phenomena but all of them rapidly gain market share, especially in fields where the matter in question is how to lower the costs related to software licensing and maintenance, like in ERP systems, for example. Although those services offer a cheaper alternative to classic software solutions, only a few of them are customizable to an extent to satisfy the needs of large corporations and medium sized businesses.
In fact, they are not developed with customizability in mind but are designed to be utilized as ready to use solutions, deployed on remote servers. In addition, large and medium sized enterprises often voice concerns that applications run on remote servers do not offer the level of security and privacy required by internal corporate standards, allowing third parties to access, in theory, their company information.

Therefore, custom application development is enjoying stable growth, with numerous organizations taking advantage of tailored software in a competitive environment, where development of complex solutions can be outsourced easily.