For a package software to work across different companies, it needs to cover the different needs of different companies. As a consequence, the more popular the package is, the bigger it gets. Or how else could it fulfill the needs of thousands of different clients and industries?
A hefty price comes with a bigger software, as most of you have experienced: you use like 10% of the functions from the software that you purchased. Often what's even worse is that you're forced to use some functions that you don't need just so that the system would work. Or pretend some field is something else just to save some bucks in customization.
But still, it's common knowledge that almost no enterprise apps can be used without any customization. Let's face it, no two companies are identical, no matter how hard you worked on it, it's always a long, costly road to success.
There's got to be a better way.
If you think buying package software is painful, wait until you try to build one in-house or hire a company to do it for you from scratch.
It's never what you expect: the cost, the product, the risk, and the delay. A good product takes years to develop, but it simply isn't a luxury custom projects have. Contract is usually won by the the people who underestimate project the most (lowest bidder). And everything is done to keep cost to a minimal.
Under these circumstances, unexpected delay, over budget, code written in a hurry becomes common in custom projects. Moreover, custom applications are notoriously costly to maintain because you must hire developers to make any change or just to keep the system working.
There's got to be a better way.
Putting the dreams of having a movie-like fancy application aside, a lot of times your need is not all that complicated. Or maybe a perfect solution that automates everything can be extremely complex, but building something that works reasonably well at a fraction of the cost makes a lot more sense.
This is the rationale behind Light Development, business software usually don't need to be as fancy as consumer applications. If the business logic and requirements can be described in a high-level way, without getting down to everything single detail of how it should look. Applications can be delivered through these tools much quicker and cheaper.
With the recent developments of the Web, cloud computing has pushed the amount of resources saved this way to another level. You no longer need a big IT team to host your own servers, network, or maintain your own software. All you need is some developers that are experienced with Light Development tools, and can instantly turn organization needs into working cloud-based applications with tools like Ragic Builder.
