India Is Well-positioned to Win the Race in the Field of Custom Application Development

The boom of custom application development is a relatively new phenomenon, which occurred only after computer manufacturers have switched to non-embed software solutions and open-source software platforms gained popularity. Originally, software developers in emerging markets like India, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Latin and South America, have no access to software documentation required to develop a reliable custom-made solution based on licensed software. Following a series of court battles and overall change in market philosophy, however, today's software market allows for creation of virtually unlimited number of customized software solutions in every field of life.

These markets developments, for their part, allowed software developers and vendors across the world to compete on equal terms with large multinationals, with custom application developing now considered a major software market segment. New software development centers emerged, mainly in Asia/Pacific region and Central and Eastern Europe, where scores of gifted and well-educated software developers started making custom software to meet requirements of local markets, originally, before setting foot in new markets abroad. Thus, today's custom application development is often outsourced to software firms in these regions, with India leading the pack in the sphere of software outsourcing.

This is the big picture in the field of custom application development and it is well-documented in numerous reports and market research papers. A good number of analysts, however, tend to focus on obvious economic drivers that have led to this market situation, apparently underestimating other factors which influence today's market for custom-made software applications.

First of all, major educational hubs in the field are no more concentrated in Europe and the United States; India has managed to build a network of reputable educational institutions in the sphere of computer hardware and software, while Eastern Europe and former Soviet Union traditionally produce well-educated professionals in the field. Secondly, all and every student now has access to myriads of open-source software solutions from which to borrow ideas and functionality, or on the basis of which to build a customized software application. Free and open-source operating systems compete on equal terms with licensed rivals, thus opening the gate to creation of entirely custom-made solutions, from the underlying operating system to business software to applications for individual users. This, combined with lower labor costs in Asia/Pacific, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, made these regions major suppliers of customized software.

Some economic experts blame software outsourcing for loss of jobs in their respective country, urging adoption of legislation to protect local software developers. On the surface, there is sound economic logic in such an approach. An in-depth market analysis, however, would reveal that adoption of such restrictions shall only decrease competitiveness, resulting in higher business expenditures and regulated labor market, which does not stimulate positive economic development in the long run.

For example, India is leading world provider of custom application development services through outsourcing thanks to a combination of factors that are natural for a free-market economy; namely, well-educated software experts, lower labor costs, access to and investment into technologies, and development of research and development hubs, where large-scale projects can be completed on time. These are factors quite similar to the competitive advantages provided by the Silicon Valley in the early days of the software industry, minus the lower payroll costs.

Anyway, custom application development market cannot be re-shaped through administrative measures for good reasons; businesses around the world have need for reliable tailored applications and need them cheap. Thus, development of custom-made software is driven by the very same market forces that drive any other industry and outsourcing of custom application development to countries like India is an inevitable process whose roots can be traced to the basics of entrepreneurship: buy cheap, sell dear. To put it simply, custom application development is destined to flourish and countries like India are well positioned to grab even bigger market share in this lucrative market.

Client Server Application Development Is Prospering Business in India

Development of client server applications witnessed highs and lows during the years, and while it has been of the competence of software vendors based mainly in the West, a growing number of such applications are now developed in locations in Asia/Pacific region, mainly in India. India has emerged as world leader in the field of software outsourcing, or software off-shoring, including in the field of client server application development, which requires in-depth knowledge in the field of developing technologically advanced applications.

In the course of a few decades, India managed to develop highly effective educational institutions where future India's software developers are graduating and built impressive infrastructure to support the growth of the local IT industry. Thus, India's software developers are now able to provide world-class service, competing on equal terms with reputable software vendors in the West, which, however, are less competitive in terms of pricing, labor costs, and even preparedness to deal with large complex projects.

Client server applications are not necessarily programs that feature millions rows of software code; nevertheless software vendors outside the United States and Europe rarely took part in development of more advanced applications of this kind only a decade ago. The times have changed, however, and growing number of business customers outsource software applicationdevelopment to India-based companies, looking for a reliable yet affordable service. Local firms, in turn, gained invaluable knowledge in the process, allowing India's software vendors to claim contracts that previously have been won mostly by multinational software developers, mainly US-based.

In fact, India-based experts are behind some of the most technologically advanced R&D projects, enabling local software industry to gain first-hand experience in collaboration with world-leading universities, private and public organizations. In a continuous process of labor skill enhancement, local software developers and consultants reached a new stage in their business development, competing on equal terms with, or providing assistance to software behemoths that are behind some major operating systems or business software suites. Thus, India's software developing industry is not seeking recognition by the outside world, but is looking to set foot in new markets that now span the entire world.

India's strategic geographic location aside, the country successfully educated more than one generation of well-trained software specialists and concurrently developed the respective infrastructure to support their efforts to gain world dominance in the field of software outsourcing. Numerous start-ups grew into well-established enterprises in the course of a decade or so, creating the backbone of a flourishing software development and software consulting industry that is now able to produce viable results in virtually every niche, including client server application development.

India's major software development centers are located in New Delhi, Mumbai, and Pune, but smaller local IT hubs are developed across the country to support development of diversified software industry in other parts of India. The results of such a policy are easily visible, with growing number of foreign companies outsourcing software development or other IT activities to India-based firms, while the local market software market is also considered as underdeveloped, thus bearing huge growth potential. That said, the market for client server application development in India, both outsourced projects and applications intended for the booming local market, is to witness marked growth in the foreseeable future.

Major Factors Making Outsourcing of IT Application Development to India a Wise Move

Outsourcing of IT application development to India is becoming widespread among Western organizations looking for reliable service at affordable price, while local software developers and vendors now have reputation as providers of world-class service. In fact, India invested heavily in education, infrastructure, and development of software research facilities before local companies, and India's economy as a whole, have become able to benefit from development of software under contracts signed with customers based abroad. It took years, probably decades, to build the necessary infrastructure allowing for uninterrupted Internet access, to develop educational institutions capable to train well-educated software experts and those professionals to gain the first-hand experience required to take part in complex and sophisticated projects on equal terms.

At present, Asia/Pacific region is leader in the field of software outsourcing services, also called software off-shoring, while India is the world's undisputed leader in this industry, accounting for more than a third of all software outsourcing contracts. There are good reasons for foreign firms to select India as their primary choice of IT application development outsourcing, including the aforementioned presence of well-developed infrastructure, but a major fundamental factor is the lower cost of software development due mainly to lower labor costs. Actually, remunerations of India's professionals involved in development of software are going up, but at slower pace compared to wage increases in the West, while local standard of living allows for far more flexible pricing.

The gradual increase of the average remuneration for a software developer in India resulted in a recent wave of foreign-educated experts who prefer to return and pursue a career in India rather than in the West, thus boosting the number of master's degree and PhD holders involved in software development. This in turn led to a sharp increase in the number of software research and development contacts heading to India from major private and public organizations abroad.

One should not underestimate the quality of locally educated software experts, though. India have poured money into higher and tertiary education for decades, creating a well-developed network of public and private educational institutions in the field of technology. The country lacks world-leading universities and institutes but the average computer expert graduated in India can easily find a decent job abroad, which means that local software firms are able to hire well-trained personnel and provide very competitive service in terms of quality and affordability.

Another major factor in India's success story is closely related to the ongoing process of technology proliferation in an inter-connected world. Educational institutions and individual researchers are able to share knowledge instantly, while the very nature of software outsourcing results in a situation where the software developers gain knowledge and familiarize with cutting edge technologies that are otherwise difficult to access. In this mutually beneficial process, the customers benefit from lower costs of software development, while software developers and software vendors to whom such projects are outsourced gain invaluable knowledge, which further boosts their competitive advantage.

Locations like Mumbai, New Delhi, and Pune are topping the list of the world cities considered to be the best places to outsource software development, research, and consulting, while the country continues to invest in order to achieve sustainable growth of these industries, choosing to bet on knowledge-based economy. It is hard to foresee whether this will be a long-lasting process in a stagnating world economy, but India's wise investments in technologically advanced education and industries can only fuel further inflow of software outsourcing contracts from abroad. In fact, thanks to thoroughly planned long-term economic development, foreign business customers are not wondering whether outsourcing of IT application development to India is advantageous but how to choose the best fit for their respective project among numerous reputable service providers.

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.

Benefits Offered by Deployment of Software for Business Intelligence Data Warehousing

Enterprise data warehousing (DW) is applied in virtually every corporation, with enterprises usually taking advantage of specialized applications to perform business intelligence data warehousing, whereas data warehouses solutions are made of servers, storage space, operating system, and specialized software. Software vendors also provide ready-to-use solutions that can be installed and run on a predefined set of hardware configurations, thus allowing enterprises to apply data warehousing in business intelligence without vast investment in new hardware and software. In addition, some software vendors have developed products that combine or run on various hardware platforms. For example, business intelligence data warehousing in Oracle systems enables managers and business owners to select from a variety of hardware platforms on which the software is able to run.

In fact, data warehousing is a process and procedure that allow managers and corporate executives to get easy access to valuable data and analyze these data for the purpose of market research or analysis of various market processes and trends. Business intelligence tools are an integral part of decent systems for data warehousing, which is often referred to as storing of data, with growing number of experts acknowledging that tools to extract data, and manage and get metadata should also be considered part of data warehousing business intelligence.

Enterprise data warehousing can be applied to support businesses in various elements of their day-to-day activities. Data warehouse applications can be applied successfully in decision support, financial forecasting, trend analysis, financial fraud analysis, etc. In fact, customized data warehousing solutions can be implemented by companies involved in any business, assisting managers in decision making process while storing valuable data for further analysis.

On the other hand, initial entry costs of data warehouse vary from $10,000 to $150,000 per terabyte; therefore, data warehousing is aimed mostly at medium-sized and large businesses that need their business intelligence tools to run smoothly, taking advantage of large volumes of data collected for analysis. Overall, implementation of data warehousing systems offers marked reduction in costs, securing low entry and maintenance costs.

Data warehousing is used in business intelligence applications partly because the performance offered by such solutions is usually better than the performance provided by other products for data storing, data retrieving, and analysis of data. Modern data warehouse platforms are able to secure high-performance using advanced analytics methods that were previously known for their low performance due to software and hardware issues that software developers and vendors were not able to solve in the past.

Scalability is another factor that plays an essential role in cost reduction with many software vendors offering data warehousing systems made of modules, which helps businesses in lowering upfront costs related to over-provisioning. In addition, scalability allows database administrators and IT managers to deploy solutions in line with company needs and requirements, following an analysis of business process and procedures within their respective enterprise.

In general, data warehousing applications provide visible results and cost reductions within months after implementation. Recently, software vendors started to provide solutions that are designed with business intelligence data warehousing in mind, thus enabling corporations to utilize such software products as strategic tools in running their day-to-day business activities.