"An exhilarating rush" is what some of our ISV clients describe to us when talking about the early days of their success. In the beginning, they started by creating a custom application for one client and then found one new client after another requesting to purchase and deploy a variation of the same application.
During this exciting early growth period, many ISVs focus on meeting individual customer needs, leading them to maintain multiple code bases of their application. While this may have worked for the companies when their client base was small, they realized it would not be sustainable as they continued to add customers. These companies needed to adopt a more formalized software development process and graduate from being an “application” company to become a true software product company.
Transforming into a software product company requires transforming a custom-built software application to a configurable standardized software product. To achieve this, your company will need to drive changes in both technology and process.
The PRS Consulting Services Software Productization Solution Transforming an application into a commercial software product requires addressing several aspects including strategy, architecture and design as well as engineering processes.
PRS Consulting Services’s dual-pronged approach focuses on both Technology Transformation and Process Transformation. Leveraging this solution approach to productize your application will dramatically improve the robustness of your market offering, ensuring long-term maintainability while at the same time enabling you to easily absorb regular changes to the software with a standard product release cycle.
PRS Consulting Services’s Technology Transformation Capabilities
Transforming an application into a quality product that meets market requirements is a complex undertaking that will require changes to both the architecture and product design. You can transform your software application into a world-class product by leveraging PRS Consulting Services’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. PRS Consulting Services’s experts will guide this process and work together with you through the feature categorization process.
- Establishing a single code line for the product core
A single code line fundamentally differentiates products from customized applications. Many products that evolve from an application were initially built for a specific customer, then multiple versions of the same application customized to support the requirements of several different customers. The result is 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
PRS Consulting Services’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 PRS Consulting Services 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. Regression testing is required for any new or modified code that impacts the operation of other code. Repeatable Automated Regression Testing positively impacts ROI in terms of reducing time to market, improving customer satisfaction through product quality, and efficiently using testing resources.
PRS Consulting Services’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.
For product companies to be successful they need a development process that is meticulous but also flexible to cater to changing needs. The process must enable companies to effectively execute on product roadmaps, provide maintenance support for older product versions, address frequently changing new product requirements and manage scope without compromising time-to-market or budgeted costs.
To support a new development process while managing the development of your existing products, your company must undergo an organizational process paradigm shift. The first step is to identify the different groups that perform the various specialized tasks during the development of the product. PRS Consulting Services’s team of experts uses 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.
Why PRS Consulting Services?
Developing products and transforming custom built software in to a mature product requires specialized skills involves technical engineering as well as process engineering. PRS Consulting Services has over 18 years of experience in providing these services to various product companies and has developed mature, repeatable best practices for high quality software productization.
Contact us for consultation on process transformation to productize your company.
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