Software

Businesses develop custom software to address needs that are not met by off the shelf software.  Here are some benefits of developing custom software for your business.

Customized to your needs

Custom software is developed to your specification.  You can be intimately involved in every step of the development to ensure that it meets your needs.

As your business evolves you can change the specification for the software, so that it evolves with your business.  If you discover better ways to perform tasks, you can have the software modified to take that into account, so that it always meets your needs.

Its not unusual for businesses to have to migrate to a new system as the business grows.  With custom software, the software can grow with your business.  This can avoid major migrations as the software grows iteratively instead.

Maintenance and Improvement

You are in control of what changes are made to your custom software and when they are made.

The updates you desire may never happen with off the shelf software and software as a service products.   The timing of updates to off the shelf software and software as a service products may be inconvenient to your business.  Changes to off the shelf software and software as a service products may make them incompatible with other software you are utilizing.

Software providers can stop supporting or providing their products.  They can also go out of business.  You decide how long your custom software will be maintained.

With custom software you decide what you need changed.  You can make sure the changes are compatible with other systems you use and you can schedule a convenient time to deploy the changes to production.

Integration

Software systems that do not work well together can disrupt the workflow in your business.  You may be able to integrate off the shelf software or software as a service solutions by writing custom software.  It is also possible that there is no way to integrate these systems.

If you own the technology stack through custom software, you can integrate all the systems you control.  You may also be able to integrate custom software with other software solutions, if those software solutions provide the facilities for integration.

Integrated systems can provide a clean and efficient workflow.  This is not possible with disparate systems.

Security

The majority of hacking attacks are made against well known widely used software packages.  If you have a web site and look at your logs, you will find a large number of attempts to attack the Wordpress admin.  There are known Wordpress admin vulnerabilities and there is large number of sites that use Wordpress so it is an effective strategy for hackers to scan for Wordpress sites to hack.

Custom software is unique to your business, so no one will be scanning indiscriminately for exploits in your software.   Hackers will have to specifically target your company to find exploits in your software.  This reduces your risk. 

It is always important that software developers understand how systems are hacked.  It is shocking how many sites are still being hacked using SQL injection.

Support

If a problem occurs with custom software, you will always know the status of any resolution.  If you are dealing with off the shelf software or software as a service solutions, you may just have to wait until the vendor addresses the problem.

Once again with custom software you are in control.

Reporting

An overlooked aspect of custom software is the ability to providing reporting on all aspects of your business.  Reporting can be created by adding tracking from software as a service solutions, such as Google Analytics, or by creating a custom reporting system with its own tracking.

The reporting from your custom software can enable you to optimize internal key performance metrics that you would not have data for otherwise.