Transforming your Software Application into a Software Product
"An exhilarating rush" is what some our ISV clients describe to us when talking about the early days of their success, when they started by creating a custom application for one client and then found one after another new client requesting purchase and deployment of the application.
During this exciting early growth period, many ISV’s focus on meeting individual customer needs, which leads them to maintain multiple code bases of their application. While this works for small client bases, it is not sustainable for companies that aspire to achieve a large customer base for their application. For these companies, a graduation or transformation to a more formalized software product company is the right path.
Graduating to become a software product company means transforming a custom built software application to a more generically marketable software product. This transformation will drive changes in both technology and process at your company.
Our Software Productization Offerings
Transforming a “Software Application” into a “Software Product” requires addressing several aspects which include strategy, architecture, design and engineering processes. You can leverage Infogain’s Software Productization offerings to transform a custom built Software Application to a more generically marketable Software Product:
- Technology Transformation Services
- Process Transformation services
Leveraging these service offerings to productize your application will dramatically improve the robustness of your market offering, ensuring long-term maintainability and enabling you to easily absorb regular changes to the software in the form of regular product releases.
Infogain’s Technology Transformation Capabilities
Transforming an application into a product that is of industrial-strength and quality and meets market demands is not easy and will require changes to both the architecture and product design. You can transform your software application into a world-class product by leveraging Infogain’s seasoned experts and their unique capabilities, including:
- Identification and separation of Product Core features and Customizable modules: While the core of the product may evolve over a period of time it does not change on a customer to customer basis. The separately handled customizable features for a product may include new custom built features or feature modification capabilities. Infogain’s experts will guide this process and work together with you through the feature categorization process.
- Establishing single code line for the product core: This is overwhelmingly important and fundamentally differentiates whether the product is really built as a product or as an application.
Many products that evolve from an application built for a specific customer to one with several customers can potentially end up with different code lines for each client type of product. Establishing a single line of code for your product will enable you to efficiently support large numbers of deployments.
- Designing for configurability: Infogain’s team will work with you to ensure your product is configurable so as to be able to adapt to different deployment environments. For example, for database-driven products the product should be able to support multiple databases without any change in business logic.
- Building in flexibility for future product changes: Products need to be durable and yet flexible enough to absorb and embrace these changes with minimal impact on business logic. Your Infogain team will work with you to incorporate best practices in design to allow this flexibility.
- Establishing Automated Test Support: Constant change is a reality for software products, and every change to the product or deployment environment needs to be thoroughly tested. This makes repeated (regression) testing an important activity that generates substantial ROI in terms of time to market, customer satisfaction, and productivity of testing resources.
Contact us now to get started on your technology transformation as you productize your application.
Infogain’s Process Transformation Capabilities
Your transformation to a product company will become complete as you commit to some important changes in your processes and organization.
Product companies need to deal with product roadmaps, devote time for maintenance of older product versions, cater to frequently changing new product requirements based on market needs, and manage scope without compromising time-to-market or budgeted costs. These complexities mean that while the development process needs to be meticulous, it must also have enough flexibility built in to cater to changing needs.
To manage this and to manage the product well, a paradigm shift in your company's mindset is required. It starts with the identification of different groups that carry out different specialized tasks for this product. Infogain’s team of experts will use a custom tailored consultative approach to set up the right internal organizational structure and introduce formalized product lifecycle management processes that will ensure the success of your product.
Contact us now for consultation on process transformation to productize your company
Why Infogain?
Developing Products and transforming custom built software in to a mature product requires specialized skills. It involves technical engineering as well as process engineering. Infogain has a track record of over 18 years of experience of providing services to various product companies. With this track record Infogain is in a position to provide engineering process consultancy for companies to come out with the right kind of engineering processes enabling them to come out with high quality releases of their software products on a repeatable basis. |
