Past, Present and Future of Applications

1980’s

XYZ Corp is a huge organization, the business requirements of this organization are spread across various processes. XYZ is facing the requirement of using Software to make their business process efficient. XYZ talks to developers and suggest that they build applications for each of their complex business process. The developers at this stage build applications for XYZ which will help XYZ in making their business process efficient. The problem with this was that the developers had to build each business process individually and the amount of effort required for this is a lot. Applications developed for different processes were developed using different technologies. Now, when the XYZ thinks about integration the Technology factor of the applications has a big disadvantage. The other constraint on these applications was that, certain developers chose not to make their source code available to the Customer. XYZ has to depend on the developer to make any changes to the application and XYZ were at the mercy of these developers to support these applications.

1990’s

XYZ Corp was looking for something reliable. The ERP companies came to the market with lots of promises. An ERP would contain all the applications required for any organization – this reduces the requirement of building separate applications for each business requirement. These applications would be built on a single platform – makes life so much easier! XYZ has gained control on the developers and restricts them to use only the ERP development framework to build the applications. The other major breakthrough which came in was, the ERP companies were willing to make available all the code which drives the various business processes – XYZ has the capability to customize the application and can make it work the way they want.

2000’s

The ERP industry has become a place where only big players can be present. All the major ERP players (Why did I say that? I could have said the two major players!) are focused on companies like XYZ Corp. The major players know for a fact that companies like XYZ can provide all the funds required for running the ERP industry. The annual support fee charged by the ERP players would give them the capability to grow in the market. Also companies like XYZ would move to the newer releases of ERP. XYZ expects these newer releases to make their life simpler, replace their Customizations with delivered Processes, whereby the number of staff (read: Customer staff) required in maintaining these Customizations can be reduced. But in reducing these Customizations they do not realize the fact that these applications are making their business rigid. Yes I concur with this quote which I took from Neil’s comment

“Yes, I like that term: “adaptation” rather than “customization”.

2010’s

The major players in the ERP industry have forgotten about the millions (or billions) of small and mid sized companies which could prove to be a bottomless well of fortune. The next generation of major ERP players are raising the bars rapidly. The Customers of interest for these ERP vendors are the smaller companies which face the same problem as what XYZ did in the 1980’s. Now these ERP vendors provide the smaller customers the applications required by them at a very low cost of ownership. They have achieved this by allowing multiple Customers to be placed on a single instance which will be hosted by these ERP companies. The data security is the responsibility of the ERP Company and they have achieved this by extending the Row-Level (Row-Level security allows user’s with proper rights to access their information) security concept of the previous decade. These ERP companies also allow Customizations to these applications by providing the Customer with the business process source-code. The Customer can make Customizations to the business processes and send the Customizations back to the ERP Company; they would host his application with Customizations at a slightly higher fee than the non-customized applications.

Although, the very essence of hosting Applications in a single instance started with the concept of all the application available to the Customers will be uniform. The decade saw the process evolve, the Processing Server (Application Server in the case of PeopleSoft) knew how exactly to present different Customizations to different Customer’s from a single instance. But at this stage these companies have found out ways of allowing multiple processes co-exist nevertheless still can’t find ways of making the Customizations at the Database Table (PeopleSoft Record) level co-exist.

The important aspect of this post is that 2010 has not started and there will be many more innovations which would drive 2010 to be what I expect it to be. And for the constraints that I’ve mentioned and omitted, the solution will be provided by a conglomeration of ideas (I mean not just my thoughts!). I’ve a couple of White Papers to write and should be some time before I can start posting again.