Share the costs, share the benefits

Thursday, 14 January 2010

Commercialise and extend your enterprise applications through The Cloud

JPY, UK distributor, consultancy and software house, has announced the start of an innovative new development and commercialisation programme. With the added development expertise of its recent acquisition, JVolution, JPY’s new strategy allows businesses to substantially cut the costs of utilising JPY’s development services while commercialising their code at a profit.

Companies are often sitting on top of core business applications, developed internally, that are very strong; so strong, in fact, that elements of them might be of use to other businesses. At the same time, the cost of having new functionality and updates written to improve these programs can be substantial.

JPY asks: “Why not commercialise programs and sell them to other businesses as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) at the same time as having them updated and improved?” In so doing JPY’s customers can reduce their development costs, reduce risk, improve the consistency of their software and generate income.

“A lot of customers’ applications do things that are generally applicable to many businesses”, said Dr John Yardley, MD of JPY. “Rather than sell customers time-and-materials development, we partner with the customer to make their web application a service. Customers get a return on their investment by allowing others to utilise all their hard work. For once, the developer is just as keen as the customer to produce a great application at the lowest cost.

"Clearly a company is not going to want to give away its competitive advantage. However, if you can abstract all the company-specific functionality and you have something left, then you probably have a commercially viable service.

"The traditional time-and-materials development model is looking increasingly creaky and frayed-around-the-edges; it’s simply not economical enough for many companies in today’s financial climate. Companies want more flexible options. Co-commercialised SaaS is the way forward. This is the kind of agile, forward-thinking response the business community deserves.”

Furthermore, as JPY points out, the benefits of making SaaS Cloud-based applications are massive whether you want to commercialise your product or not. The Cloud removes up-front capital costs, hardware concerns and scaling issues. The Cloud can also empower a more mobile workforce and reduce the risk of local IT disasters bringing your business to a halt.

“Nor does developing applications as SaaS mean reinventing the wheel,” continued John. “A huge amount of code is now available as Open Source and in standard libraries. In the last year or two, a wide variety of technologies and other factors have really come together that make the SaaS model workable. The time to be developing Cloud-based Enterprise Applications is now.”

JPY’s willingness to speculate on others’ business applications is borne of long experience. JPY has commercialised several of its own applications; including its MRX messaging project, which has involved Open Source, Cloud computing and SaaS. This, combined with its track record of developing and distributing leading-edge workflow products and its strong connection with a wide range of resellers, puts JPY in a unique position to extend its commercialisation and development services to others.

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