How Do SaaS and PaaS Impact Bespoke Applications in the Enterprise?

Bespoke applications are used only within an organization and not marketed or sold externally to customers. They are usually developed by an internal software development team but organization may also hire external resources to build a bespoke app. In my career, I have worked with bespoke applications for asset management, ticket management, etc. that were intentionally developed for internal-only use. I have also come across application that were developed with the intent to be sold to customers, or came from acquisitions but again with the intent to commercialize the acquired technology. Then priorities change, external customers move on to other vendors, and when the dust settles, only one internally deployed instance of the application remains: a bespoke application.  

The key benefit of a bespoke application is that it only follows organization’s own requirements and is therefore customized to the specific needs of the organization: it connects to other bespoke components, uses internal databases, does not require purchasing licenses, and is fully controlled by the organization. The drawbacks are that it does not bring any revenue to the company, struggles therefore for resources, and usually has limited support. Lack of external customers means low pressure to keep detailed and updated documentation, and when the software developers who build the application move on to another project, few people know how to fix or upgrade the application. There are however exceptions: bespoke apps in IT-focused companies may have sizable resources and successfully fend off attempts to replace them with commercial alternatives. 

Many bespoke applications developed before public clouds became common place are still lingering in enterprise basements, running on old servers, and without updates for years. When security audits and network scans find old operating systems and deprecated protocols, the alarm bells go off, and the IT team has the choice among fighting for a security exception and keeping the app running, finding a way to bring the app to compliance with new security standards, or shutting down the app which inevitably creates uproar in the user community.   

In my career, I have also found out that bespoke applications have a strong emotional component. They were usually developed to solve real company problems at a time when commercial alternatives were not available. The people who developed successful bespoke applications are often promoted to leadership positions and still have warm feelings towards the application and the team supporting it. The future of bespoke applications is therefore a sensitive topic in IT organizations.    

SaaS services are a serious threat to bespoke applications because they bring commercial alternatives to new areas, for example, ITSM and ITOM, onboarding, or even compliance. Cloud apps allow for rapid evaluations: end users (employees) can experience multiple UIs, participate in the selection process, and become more willing to switch from a beloved bespoke app to a new cloud service. Cloud services also drive companies to exit the hosting business altogether and migrate their applications to the cloud. Such migrations trigger stringent security reviews and require modifications to make the application work in a cloud environment. In the absence of software developers who know a particular bespoke application and can modify it, the strategy for such applications is often to just keep them on premise as long as possible, and then shut them down completely.

This however does not mean that there is no need for bespoke applications in the enterprise: organizations will always require some proprietary functionality or integrations that are not commercially available. Since IT is a major competitive differentiator, having proprietary functionality can give competitive edge to an organization. 

So how can organizations develop bespoke applications in the new era of cloud services? Over the past 2 years I helped hundreds of companies develop bespoke applications on the Twilio PaaS platform. Since PaaS hides the infrastructure complexity, app developers do not need to think about hardware, networking, operating systems, and availability / reliability / security in lower layers of the stack. The big advantage of using PaaS to develop bespoke applications therefore is that the organization can meet its unique business requirement and create custom functionality quickly and on a small budget. One of my customers developed a very functional application during a one-day hackathon. The pay-as-you-go billing model further reduces the barriers to entry and fits well bespoke applications: a relatively small number of users means a small monthly bill. The only caution about using PaaS services for bespoke apps is that the app has to follow changes / updates of the cloud provider’s APIs. Such changes are rare and PaaS providers stay backward compatible while allowing for generous transition periods when deprecating APIs.     

For Enterprise Architects, PaaS significantly reduces the cost of developing custom applications and makes therefore the “build” option much more competitive with the “buy” option. The conversation between the EA on the customer side and the account team on the PaaS provider side becomes a discussion about option for implementing the required functionality (use case). If the organization / customer has strong software development team, they can develop the app on the PaaS platform with limited or no help by only using the detailed online documentation and code samples. If the organization does not have internal resources to do that, they can hire a Consulting System Integrator (SI) who has experience with the particular PaaS platform and can develop the app for them. If that is not an option, the organization can look at Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) who have already developed applications for the required use case. Bottom line: the cloud that displaces many bespoke applications also enables the development of myriads of new ones.    

I would like to thank Michael Thaney at Constellation Brands for his excellent review comments.