IT continues its drive to add value by enabling the businesses and co creating business. It is one of the important enablers of competitive strategy for businesses. The traditional application development and lifecycle management still continues amidst approx 10 to 20% applications are taken and used standard out of the box. There are around 1 to 3% applications moving in direction of “Software as a Service”, pay for use.
While all of the above is evolving we have seen that our so called Smart Phones are becoming more and more powerful with ability to run most of the internet browsing capabilities as well as mobile platform for application development.
With iOS and Android’s ease of use to create mobile applications, we have seen a very high rise in individual mobile applications enabling us in all areas of life. Apple has millions of these appls sold and these come for as low as 1USD per user. Android based applications are increasing as well and used on various mobile platforms.
This is the start of applications becoming commodity / utility and it means that for all day 2 day applications as well as collaboration applications will move towards mobile platform and available on internet round the clock at very low cost and used in very high volumes.
On the other hand the business specific applications are moving towards pay for use “Software as a Service” model. A few examples of the same are, Concur for expense management, Salesforce.com for order management. SAP, Microsoft and Google are also working on creating Pay for use applications which are low cost, transaction driven applications. In conjunction providers are also working on leveraging Cloud Computing and Service Oriented Architecture for creating mobile applications.
Google has launched Google Appls Store which is not just for mobile appls but appls that can be accessed and used using browser online. Microsoft is in process of launching Office 365 online for working virtually from anywhere.
All of the above are showing the signs that we are on the journey towards creating and using Pay for use as well as mobile applications more and more. In coming years this would lead to a utility model of using applications based on the needs and opening a new way of using applications from an appstore provider instead of making a new one ourselves every year.
On one side this will give more agility to the business to choose the solutions off the shelf while on the other end it will create more flexibility and control issues to ensure we choose the right appls throughout the company for effective use. This is more important for MNCs adapting the out of box applications then for individuals/small/medium enterprises.
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