Philip Padfield blog no 1/Fluency web site/Sept 10th 2007.

The end of software? 'Pah!' says Philip Padfield

The death knell for software has been sounded repeatedly over the last decade, yet, funnily enough, packaged software as we know and love it is a long way from kicking any buckets. Why is that, one wonders?

Indeed, for all the arguments in favor of hosted software services as a more sustainable alternative, there remains a wealth of support behind the ability to own, run, secure and manage the technology on an organization's own premises.

Proponents of buying externally hosted applications on a no-commitment, pay-as-you-go basis, insist that this is the most cost-effective, flexible, low-burden way of accessing the latest functionality. And okay, this is often the case. Timothy Chou, the former head of Oracle On-Demand, in his controversial book, The End of Software, warns those of the old school that buying software outright incurs high costs whenever customization is needed, because this usually requires recourse to the greedy, conniving vendor. Conveniently, these expensive service fees must then be repeated each time there is a software update. A devious ploy, and no mistake!

In the contact center speech recognition market, this is understandably prohibitive, given the speed with which customer services are introduced and refreshed, and therefore system tweaks are needed.

The biggest mistake the software industry makes, though, is to force companies into a one-size-fits-all way of doing things. Customers should be able to choose how they procure and manage their packaged applications. What's more, if they do choose to own and run these behind their own company firewalls, they should have the ability to change the various settings and scripts themselves, without the need for external help. That's our line anyway. After all, we're sufficiently financially robust without needing to line our pockets with ungainly proceeds…;-)

For the foreseeable future, the argument over whether organizations should buy or tap into their software functionality as a managed utility will be redundant. To talk about horses for courses would be to labor a hackneyed cliché, but that really is how organizations should approach the way they purchase software - basing their strategy on their own unique priorities.

While banks will have strict policies determining that anything touching customer data must remain firmly behind the internal firewall, other businesses may prefer the freedom associated with being able to buy into software functionality only as and when they need it.

In allowing all of the above, Fluency plays out the ideal scenario, in a way that other vendors can only look on with slightly yellowing tones... Not only do we support both on-premise and hosted software delivery models, we also make it easy for our customers to switch between the two, because the technology is the same whichever approach you take.

One of our US customers, electrical retail giant, Circuit City, exploits this flexibility very well, using our technology on its premises for everyday customer services operations and then using additional hosted capabilities at peak times or for particular initiatives. Other companies exploit this flexibility to try out the technology before they commit to it.

Dealing with a vendor that supports both delivery models offers a further comfort factor for our customers, too, who are reassured by the fact that we are a well capitalized business that does not depend solely on the drip-feed revenue of hosted services provision…