Software companies in Sri Lanka have long since been at the forefront of custom software development for local and international clientele alike. Skilled talent coupled with great cost savings make the island nation a worthwhile option for leading brand names to establish their software base here. As businesses continue to operate in a marketplace that is fierce as it is rapidly evolving, owners and entrepreneurs need to ensure they are always one step ahead, in order to stay relevant and thereby generate revenue.
While many factors come into play for the purpose of standing out to prospective customers, building your software from scratch is one of the biggest influencing factors – especially if your business has been functional for a longer period of time. By developing proprietary software that is owned and managed internally, businesses stand to be independent from cookie-cutter SaaS products that share their resources with other clientele. Add to this greater security, scalability as well as building only what you absolutely need, and you have a powerful enterprise software that can serve you for years to come (if not permanently).
Leading software development companies understand just how important autonomy is to their clientele, in this day and age. As a result, such software development agencies now offer dedicated teams for their clients, so business owners and managers have a single and centralised point of contact for all their custom software requirements. With every member in a dedicated software development team exclusively hired to service the client at hand, businesses can rest assured that their team is completely focused on their unique requirements – while being based externally.
Custom software development builds software from scratch, based on a business’s unique needs. Unlike off-the-shelf software, custom software delivers value by focusing only on features that are of value to users, while integrating any third-party tools as needed. As a result, custom software development requires resources that are dedicated to building your software anew, which includes (but isn’t limited to) designers, developers, QA testers and project managers. While this incurs a significantly higher cost than that of its SaaS counterparts, bespoke software offers greater value and scalability – all while being completely proprietary.
Likewise, EFutures, as a leading custom software development company in Sri Lanka, understands the true value that custom software can bring to businesses – irrespective of size or industry. We build bespoke software products for our clientele with a deep emphasis on their business pains, which thereby gives us the insights we need for knowing which functionalities to incorporate – so that our clientele can achieve their best with the right software.
Being proprietary and self owned is the greatest advantage of custom software, without a doubt. With software that is completely owned by your business, you need not depend on the resources offered by third-party providers to store data or release patches. This also extends over to security; with your custom software also being hosted on servers that are owned and managed by your business, security for confidential data is strengthened.
With custom software, you also forgo the tension of depending on the longevity of a SaaS software provider; lest a vendor shuts their business down, you may be left scrambling to migrate your data over to another product, and start all over again – from searching the market for a suitable product, to implementation and training.
Since custom software is proprietary and is built to only suit one entity (which is your business), your software development team is free to only focus on what you and your employees need from the software – and nobody else. This means that your software will consist only of necessary features that users will find valuable, with less clutter along user interfaces as well.
On the other hand, cookie-cutter software products always come with features that you may not find useful, yet need to pay for as you subscribe to a monthly or annual package. With custom, proprietary software, your business is spared from worrying about subscribing to unwanted features and working with excess clutter across an application, so your teams can focus only on what matters.
Custom software can be scaled as and when you prefer, depending on when your business notices a peak in traffic or demand. By paying for cloud-based resources on an as-needed basis, your software development team will be equipped to increase virtual infrastructure as required, while also having the means to decrease resource quantities to reflect any fluctuations in demand. Although SaaS software provides users the option to scale up whenever needed, this most probably includes upgrading to a package with more features – some of which may not be needed. On the other hand, extra resources such as storage can be purchased as monthly add-ons, which could make such surcharges more expensive in the long run.
Doing a thorough business assessment is the first step towards building custom enterprise software. Start by gathering relevant members across all your teams, including any end users of the software. Ask questions that pertain to existing business problems and bottlenecks, so your teams can get a conversation going that ultimately sheds light on what’s wrong, what’s lacking as well as any repetitive tasks that can be automated to save everyone time. Collate all these thoughts into a brief, which could then be used as the main source of information for software development teams as they work on the overall software architecture of your project.
With your business assessment, you will be well equipped to brief your software development team on the problems that currently face your business, as well as the goals you need to achieve. This information shall help your team of designers and developers determine which features are required, so they can incorporate the same into the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) for building and testing. Although the information gathering and business assessment stage is completed by now, software development teams and clients need to continue working closely to ensure all progress is as expected, and all team members are on the same page about what is due to be released.
Additionally, an Agile project management environment shall also encourage any iterations mid-way, depending on changing requirements, or simple trial and error that takes place in due course of testing. As a result, this makes it flexible to deviate from the original business assessment, especially if it helps businesses achieve a new set of goals that are important for enhanced engagement, traffic as well as bottom line growth.
An MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is a preliminary, minimalistic software version that only consists of the most necessary features. Depending on how well the software is received as well as subsequent user feedback, an MVP’s features can be improved to suit user preferences accordingly, while incorporating newer features that are strictly based off of what users have clearly shown interest in. As a result, an MVP helps build a software product that is power-packed only with what is necessary and valuable, thereby saving precious time and effort for both software development teams as well as end users.
Being a stepping stone for building intricate yet highly resourceful software products, an MVP shall also accommodate any changes in business goals and KPIs, by enabling software development teams to recalibrate feature sets with greater ease and less downtime – especially if carried out in an Agile project environment.
Custom software development has now become a norm in the digital business space, as more organisations realise the value it can bring for improving revenue, reducing costs, heightening employee productivity as well as automating any tasks that are repetitive or mundane. With software development agencies now also catering to custom software development by offering dedicated software development teams, businesses all over the world are now finding it easier to get started, as they can now reap the benefits of a team that is completely dedicated to building targeted, strategic software – while being managed by an external software development company.
By building software and code that is proprietary, organisations need not worry about depending on third-party SaaS vendors for their software needs. This also extends over to having functionalities that are precisely built to suit your business’s unique requirements, as opposed to depending on features from an off-the-shelf product that may be more generic – including any excess features that may not even be useful, while being bound by a contract to pay for them every month. As a result, custom software is a great option for businesses of any speciality or size to invest their time, money and effort in, as it can be scaled more smoothly in the long run as well.