Imagine you are working in a company that develops custom software. You are competing for customers who believe that their requirements are so special and unique that they are looking for IT consultants and developers who implement software individually for them. Furthermore imagine the perfect project:

1. You have enough people, time and budget to elicitate the requirements of the customer in a very complete way.
2. In your team you have smart software architects who are able to read between the lines of the requirement document and construct a software architecture that is configurable and extensible.
3. Your customer is willing to pay some extra bucks to get all the things that really good software is made of: Nice user interface, installer routine, procedures for automated testing, ...
4. You can aggree with you customer about a support plan that also covers future versions of the software.
5. Last but not least you do it, you really do it: You document your work.

Of course a project like this would be a great success. Your customer would be very happy! She got a custom developed solution that is tailored exactly to her needs. Additionally the software would be very professional; she would not have gotten something very different if there would have been an off-the-shelf solution available on the market.

When founding software architects we decided to build off-the-shelf software. Reading the description of a perfect custom-software project above you may ask why we want to do that. Developing custom software and off-the-shelf software does not seem very different, does it? Why don't we do a single project, take the software, sell it to similar companies all around the world and get rich?

Everyone who is really working in a consulting or development shop building tailored software for customers knows the problem: There is NEVER a perfect project. All projects suffer from

• a lack of resources,
• too little time,
• small, if not tiny budgets,
• missing skills,
• ...

The reason is not hard to guess. Customers have to look for their return on investment. They can make their ROI better by increasing the revenue AND by reducing their investment. Let's assume that they already do their very best to produce as much revenue as they are able to. As a result they will try to keep their investments small. They will think very hard before they spend a single dollar. Software development is not cheap after all.

In my experience customly developed software products that have been implemented with limited resources suffer from missing components off-the-shelf software typically provide today:

• Install (and uninstall) routines
• Carefully planned releases
• Strategies for ensuring a high level of software quality
• Product documentation for
  • pre-sales phase,
    (allowing a customer to evaluate the software)
  • installation and administration
    (allowing a customer to set up the software and configure it correctly)
  • configure and use of the software
• Possibilities to configure and extend the software to adopt it to a customer's individual needs to a certain extent
• Support hotlines, support personnel
• ...

Many of the things mentioned above are a question of a software's architecture. As an example I am sure that it is very hard to subsequently build support for configurable forms into a reasonably large software program. Either it has been designed to have it from the beginning or the chance is gone.

I personally have implemented to many software projects in which at the end I was certain that I could have produced something better if there would not have been the tough restrictions which I was facing during the projects. At software architects we decided to build off-the-shelf software products. We want to generate great results having less budget restrictions because many customers contribute their money to the projects by paying license fees. For what it's worth, I think that is really the difference. The business model for off-the-shelf software enables better products by having more customers paying for it.

Is it possible to start an off-the-shelf software business out of a custom-development shop? In my opinion it surely is. However, I am convinced that you have to be aware of that a software built individually for one customer can mostly be only a prototype for the off-the-shelf version. Take it as a part of your specification and start creating the architecture as well as the development from scratch. But be careful! An existing customer in the back is a great marketing advantage, no question. Yet there is the risk to get blind for the needs of the whole market if you focus to much on a single organization during requirement elicitation and management.

Off-the-shelf means a higher risk. You have to invest more at the beginning and hope that your investment pays back later. We decided to take the risk. I am so curious whether we can be as successful with off-the-shelf software as we have been in the custom development business...