Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
experience, vendors rarely find the opportunity to improve their
products.
An off-the-shelf product needs an ecosystem for the “product” to
become a “solution” for the customer. The ecosystem consists of
integrators, sales and support channels, and also user communities
and resource pools of people with experience in using the product.
This ecosystem gets developed only with implementations. Natu-
rally, if there are not enough implementations, the product has a
weak ecosystem, which would not give any credit to the product.
It is difficult to develop affordable business applications for small
and mid-market customers. The normal categories in which markets
are divided — small
,
mid-market, and enterprise — can be mis-
leading when it comes to creating or buying enterprise software.
There is a core complexity that comes from the nature of the
domain and does not diminish because the customer runs a small
business. These are akin to setup costs in manufacturing, which
often remain the same irrespective of the length of the production
run. Taking another analogy, if one is throwing a party, one needs
to clean the house irrespective of whether the guest list is four or
forty people. Smaller companies do indeed handle fewer transac-
tions, and code combinations, but still this will not reduce the
design and development complexity for the vendor. That is, com-
plexity does not automatically decrease because the customer is
small or mid-market. Unfortunately, the affordability does go down
with the size of the market, which creates a problem for both the
buyer and the seller. This is one of the prominent reasons why
many products targeting small business are unable to show good
market penetration (except, maybe, for computing infrastructure
or office automation-type, stand-alone applications).
The Involved Parties
Successful off-the-shelf (OTS) product implementations involve, invariably,
three parties:
1.
Vendor
2.
Customer
3.
Systems integrator
The partnership between the three is critical to any implementation's
success. The vendor goes through the product creation and management
activities to create a product that has a ready market and can stand
