Going Modern

The current state of affairs has most organizations asking IT to build business cases for new expenditures, especially when it comes to updating an application that isn’t necessarily broken.  For IT, broken tends to mean that an application is getting harder to find resources to keep it current, maintenance is time consuming, and the technology it’s built on can’t support the features the business is asking for.  For the business, it’s about revenue.  If an application gives them what they need, let’s them do their job, it works.  However, if they feel the application is holding them back and keeping them from realizing the most revenue possible, it gets top modernization priority. For example several of our most recent banking customers want to leverage existing back office systems (e.g. pricing engines) to extend their global trading systems to external traders, partners and banking customers. This drives significant revenue by dramitically increasing transaction volume and customer satisfaction through eCommerce.

When a decision is made to modernize, the discussion always get political.  Some folks are in favor of building their own application to ensure it serves their business, while others feel the cost savings of going with a Commercial Off-the-shelf Software (COTS) solution is a no brainer.  The build vs. buy dilemma is as old and stubborn as PowerBuilder, Visual Basic and C++ themselves.  Neither approach is wrong, but all have their drawbacks.  Modernizing an application using in-house resources ensures that specific features and functionality will be included, but not without a cost.  A COTS solution can dramatically reduce the costs, but tends to require a trade off of features and functions leaving the business without any real advantage or edge.   So, what’s the answer?  That’s a million dollar question, and a puzzle more and more organizations are having to solve.  How are you approaching modernization at your organization?  Is revenue driving final decisions?  What are your thoughts on the build vs. buy question?

Chris Heidelberger, CEO, Nexaweb

Legacy applications are an even bigger headache than was originally thought. The announcement of Nexaweb Advance has generated huge attention in the media and has caused a 400% jump in traffic to www.nexaweb.com over a normal 5 day period. Check out some of the coverage below:

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