Second Coming Of Best-Of-Breed Applications: Are You Ready?

Have you noticed that application technology advances normally follow a ‘Spiral’?

There was a time when Mainframes and Terminals ruled the data centres and offices of corporate America. Then came the client server push led by Oracle, Sybase and Sun, which unleashed the first wave of disruptive technology within the enterprise. IT organisations started to put a lot of computing power in the hands of their users. It was a new beginning for the computer application industry and a whole set of application software companies like People Soft, Siebel, Oracle, SAP etc emerged as market leaders in business categories like HR, CRM, manufacturing and financials. This was the first coming of best-of-breed applications.

Corporations started to jump on to this band wagon in hoards and soon started to realise the pain of integrating, upgrading and maintaining these systems. Maintenance and integration cost started to skyrocket way past the software licencing costs. Corporations came out of this whole experience realising that the cost of integrating these systems far out weighs the benefit of going with best-of-breeds. Application software companies took advantage of this opportunity to expand their product lines to cross functional boundaries. Application companies started to look like ‘Jack of all trades, but master of none’.

During this time, a new software delivery model started to emerge. Applications on Demand. It was companies like Corio (bought by IBM) that started this new trend. Their business model was to take off-the-shelf ERP/ CRM applications and host them to increase RoI for their customers. Conceptually, this was a ground breaking model. However, they faced many challenges trying to host these monolithic applications that were never built to support the on demand model. This effort was immediately followed by the emergence of a new set of application software companies focusing on the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery model and Salesforce.com led the way. The success of Salesforce.com marked the beginning of SaaS as a viable software delivery model that could greatly benefit customers.

While all this was happening, there was a huge push for standardisation in the industry. Web Service standard was the most notable one. Web services provide a standard means of interoperating between different software applications, running on a variety of platforms and/or frameworks. WSDL and SAOP became software development mantras.

SaaS has paved the way for the second coming of best-of-breed applications by lowering the adoption cost and risk. For the first time, customers will be able to enjoy lower cost of ownership and a higher RoI from their software investments. Nothing comes free. As more and more best of breed SaaS applications start to emerge (eg. Salesforce.com, Workday, Coupa, Netsuite, Zuora, Intacct, Taleo etc…), process gaps will start to widen as you start integrating them. You may ask, doesn’t this lead to the same integration problem that companies had to deal with during the early days of best-of-breed adoption. Yes, it does. Hope you can see the ‘Technology Spiral’ now.

The big difference this time around is that we are well prepared to address this issue with the help of open standards like Web Services. A new category of tools is being readied by companies to tackle this problem that will help you bridge these process gaps by building Business Mashups without having to write a single line of code and going further, you can deploy these Mashups to the cloud. I wonder, are we at the gates of ‘Softopia’ where software is assembled without having to write a single line of code.

So the big question is, ‘Is your company ready for the second coming of best-of-breed applications?’

Nedungadan is a software developer with Serena Software.