Trying to gather the team -- we were all out for lunch today and happen to meet a dear old customer from our application development days. For simplicity, I would keep my friends identity anonymous and refer him as 'George'.
George runs a very successful market research and online analytics venture with most of their customers belonging to the fortune 500 with offices in UK, USA, Ireland and India. Their success is built upon the time tested research and customer analysis methodology which is deeply ingrained in everything they do. Over the years, they have heavily relied on technology and recently internet programs for customer access, running campaigns and digitizing business rules for 360' customer analysis. So to say, an ISV (Independent Software Vendor) which has done exceptionally well...
In 2001, when they moved their client server based research system on the internet, we suggested them the .ASP route, which cost him approximately INR 500,000 (USD$ 21000000 at current currency value), which worked great unless the threat of limited support for ASP got to them like Pascal did, and handed them over to Microsoft .NET with VB.NET & another fresh round of budget/investments. Turns out he is on the verge of another change, simply because every customer demands a SaaS enabled copy and he thinks this would help him to break even on his heavy technology infrastructure and unlock from expensive hardware-software licenses, etc. Such is the unappreciating world of technology ...
Let’s jump to the people side of things - where the scenario is bit scarier! The in house software development team with George has increased two times and seems like most of the time is spend on requirement analysis, system design and communication regarding business rule changes which is tied down to the software code. The software seems to be running the business, not him.
Now that we were all down with a few more rounds of caffeine, well past our next scheduled meetings -- we spoke at length on some of the concepts behind our PaaS and how technology evolutions have little or no implications on our cloud applications. We went right across his pain points, addressing the separation of software code from business rules and touched upon the dangers of SaaS – locked inside a cloud. We could see the shine on his face, the customer acceptance in his own eyes and will never forget his astonishing comments, 'If only I had a transformation engine, I could change my business rules and get it to work with all the software’s in the world’
Hastily, I couldn’t resist, ‘This is why we exist George, thank you for assuring us -- ISV's do love us a lot…’
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