Who says you can't have custom apps in the cloud?

Image by Ivan Walsh via Flickr

When I first started down the path of building out a software as a service (SaaS) platform for business applications, a common criticism I heard about SaaS was that they were really limiting in what you can do with them. You either take the application the way it is, or you go somewhere else. Beyond a few simple configurations and changing the odd color-scheme here and there, prepackaged applications running in the cloud were limited. 

Now enterprise applications on the other hand were apparently not limited. You could spend tens or hundreds of thousands on professional services to customize the app of your dreams. So that made them better. Hmm, no wonder I often heard the 'build vs. buy' discussion during lengthy sales cycles. 

These seemed to be limited options if you needed an application that fitted your businesses:

• build from the ground up
• invest in an enterprise software application and professional services
• build your app on the Salesforce platform and still write loads of code

Now I'm not saying that the argument about finding an application online to run a common business process, such as travel expense reports, doesn't mean that you are going to get whatever the vendor believes is the right way of working. And for the cost, there needs to be a general, reusable approach. You don't get a lot of options when you're paying $5 a month or less. But this is a feature of the business model (shifting high volumes of cookie-cutter product). 

If the platform has been built right, as Salesforce has shown, it is not the technology behind the scenes that prevents a vendor from offering far more configuration and customization. Salesforce has gone to an extreme it seems.  But it does show that without just building a completely new solution from the ground up there is the possibility to get software specific to your requirements in the cloud. At the same time, just like building off any platform, there are constraints that you must adhere to.

These thoughts come to mind as I'm just finishing off the testing phase of a help desk and equipment management application for a TV station "out west". I'm enjoying that I have a great platform to be building on (yes, Consected does really do some great stuff!) and can put together process and information management solutions like this really quickly with 98% configuration. I'm even happier that the platform can be extended. Not just with an API and a whole bunch of new software following the Salesforce model. But with some simple tweaks of the software itself, allowing an improvement for every client, or a completely new chunk of functionality specific to just the one client. This is the joy of owning the platform itself.

So if you ever need a custom solution that does not need the full expense and hassle of those other options, do look a little further than the closed SaaS applications that meet the needs of many, just not you. And don't assume that custom applications always require teams of software developers, for enterprise application customization or Salesforce. There is a middle ground, and some smaller vendors like Consected can provide the flexibility that the "box-pushers" can not.

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Related articles

• The Clear ROI of SaaS (blogs.forbes.com)
• The OEMing of SaaS: build or buy? (zdnet.com)
• Cloud & Outsourcing Service Providers (cloudave.com)
• Yes, The Cloud is Real! (cloudintegration.wordpress.com)

Thick or thin for heads-down workers

Thick or thin, that is the question. At least for 'heads-down' workers typically involved with processing large amounts of information on screen extremely rapidly, thick client applications have long been considered the only way to go.

Proponents of thick clients used to argue for the richness of UI that could be presented, but I feel that modern browser based apps on the web show that this doesn't have to be the way. I'm sure you have your favorites you use every day.

So it comes back to performance - speed of refreshing the screen and displaying information. Heads-down users need the applications to work fast, update dynamic data rapidly, display document images in sub-second times, so that their boss can benefit from an aggregate of 'per-click' savings. Thick client-server apps claim the gold standard here.

Can dynamic AJAX applications really keep up? After all, the limitation here becomes the latency of the network. Can browser applications compete with the thick client running on an over-inflated PC generating dynamic displays from data cached ahead of time? Unlikely, as the thick client probably wins every time, pulling data behind the scenes in large chunks.

So, can we really say that browser based UIs are suitable for heads down workers, or are they just more convenient for IT in not having to roll out complex installable applications? Or are browser based apps up to the task? After all modern networks are fast, clever data caching can be built in, and new Javascript engines are claiming to get orders of magnitude faster.

Silverlight and Flash are battling for the new rich Internet application space. I question whether they just provide a nice toolset for building highly dynamic application UIs that roll out easily, or can they really provide a higher performance operation? Don't get me wrong, anything that speeds the design and deployment of applications is a good thing, but when they are really a nice skin on Internet technology, can they offer the performance of a true thick app?

When the standard heads-down applications typically are plain, keyboard driven, frankly having little glitz or glamour, is there a place for rich Internet application technologies? Or will software vendors just adopt them as a sales tool, to out-pretty the other guys.

A post from the Improving New Account Opening blog