Business software cost trap: when flexibility becomes expensive
Nucleus software platform offers an alternative to conventional application development and enables cost savings of up to 40 percent.
Sauerlach (Munich), June 18, 2008 – One of the most important requirements of business software is its ability to evolve with the company. However, this still comes at the price of high customization costs, high susceptibility to errors and long release cycles. The software expert Novabit (www.novabit.de) warns of a creeping danger here: IT that can only react to changing business requirements with difficulty and at great expense increasingly represents a significant business risk. This can be remedied by a completely new methodology for creating business applications in which the application logic of the software is managed by the users themselves and adapted to their changing needs. This enables significantly shorter phases for design, testing and coordination with the IT department, as well as maintenance that is independent of release cycles. The clear advantage: companies can save up to 40 percent of development and deployment costs for business software.
With Nucleus into “Application Development 2.0”
Similar to the “Web 2.0” philosophy, in which the users generate the content, Novabit enables a kind of “application development 2.0” with the Nucleus software platform. Here too, users can create, modify and maintain the application they use themselves. The software platform is a universal system that separates the technical basis from the business logic of an application. General, tried and tested software components are reused as standard components, while the specific application logic can be modified and adapted by the user. In this way, the otherwise necessary coordination between the specialist department and IT is completely eliminated. The division of tasks within the company is therefore much more efficient, competence-related and ultimately also more cost-effective.
Integration instead of isolated solutions
The standardization of existing IT landscapes made possible by Nucleus also has a positive effect on costs. The majority of maintenance and support costs in companies are caused by the proliferation of different individual solutions. This makes the centralization and standardization of process-independent tasks, such as user management, data security, logging, data warehousing, etc., virtually impossible. Nucleus offers a standardized integration platform that can bring together and unify the various isolated solutions. This benefits both users and companies: IT becomes clearer overall, can be used better by users and meets their specific requirements much more precisely.
Step-by-step requirements definition
Another cost factor in application development is the definition and implementation of specifications and requirements. Nucleus enables companies to take an iterative or step-by-step approach to specifying requirements: It is no longer absolutely necessary to first fully specify an application – which is usually only possible to a limited extent,- in order to then implement it in a single long realization phase independent of the user. The longer this realization phase is, the more likely it is that the originally defined requirements have already changed again. Instead, requirements definition and realization go hand in hand. Initial requirements can be implemented even without a detailed specification and then refined step by step or even while the system is still in use. This step-by-step approach is the only way to ensure that the resulting software optimally meets the requirements. As a result of the much shorter development and implementation phase, cost savings of up to 40 percent can be achieved on average. What often takes several months or even years with conventional methods can be implemented in just a few weeks or months with Nucleus.
Klaus Röder, Managing Partner of Novabit, therefore recommends Nucleus as a combination of standard and individual solutions in order to approach the topic of application development in an optimal and cost-efficient manner: “Standard software can only insufficiently cover the specific requirements of users, while the development of individual software is very time-consuming and cost-intensive. In both cases, companies can very quickly fall into a cost trap. Nucleus’ innovative approach utilizes the advantages of standard and individual software and eliminates the disadvantages of both.”
