Codejig allows vendors of independent software to make and sell business software that can be easily customized for the individual needs of each customer without invoking substantial maintenance costs on the part of the vendor.
That, at first, might seem counter-intuitive. Most software vendors try to avoid customizations and want to sell the same version of software for everyone. The reason for this is that multiple versions of software are difficult to maintain and that results in additional costs and efforts on the part of the vendor.
However, users of business software want customization due to their unique business processes or business models. Because of "one size fits all" attitude taken by software vendors, user companies are presented with a difficult choice: either you take an open-source business software, customize and maintain it on your own or you change your business processes to fit the current version of business software in use.
Both choices have drawbacks. Quite often "open-source" is not really a community-driven open-source code, instead, it has some software vendor behind who controls development and imposes limitations on functionality and usage. If company decides to customize this limited open-source version, it means, besides the initial development effort, an acceptance of the fact that customized version has to be maintained by the company for many years. It will be painful or simply impossible to upgrade to new versions as they become available.
That will happen because software vendors or development teams do not care about customizations made by end customers and do not provide easy means of upgrading customized versions. Resolving conflicts between the customized version and the new standard version can be a time-consuming and difficult work which can go beyond resources of small or medium size companies.
On the other hand, adjusting business processes and people to fit software seems to be stupid, not only time-consusing and difficult. The company risks losing its unique competitive advantage and is still forced to develop a special software to handle special cases. This "special" software has to be integrated with the "standard" software and integrations prove to be costly, unreliable and creating the same maintenance problem.
Codejig platform allows to develop software in a way that makes maintenance and upgrades of multiple customized versions an easy task. It embraces customized versions and multiple branches by design and uses a unique intelligent version merging procedure.
Merging takes advantage of the program metadata and allows to present differences between versions from high-level perspective. Conflicts are resolved without the need to compare lines of code, dependencies are tracked automatically and choices made during resolution are remembered and applied during future upgrades.
The intelligent merging procedure allows to upgrade customized versions to a new version of standard software in minutes or hours depending on the amount of customizations. In contrast, upgrade of customized version of ERP software written, say, in Python and consisting of 2000 source-code files and database can take days, weeks or months.
This kind of time saving allows for a whole new array of possibilities both for software vendors and end customers. If maintenance costs are reduced to a negligent amount, customized version becomes a significant benefit for software vendors because it generates considerable revenue from consulting and supporting work which otherwise would be absent.
In many cases end customer requiring customization will simply order development services from software vendor and will be happy to pay a modest maintenance fee for performing eventual upgrades. Furthermore, vendors can offer both customizable and non-customizable versions of standard software and put higher price tag on the customizable version.
Usually customizations themselves are extremely easy and fast due to usage of visual rapid application development tools and Scratch-like visual language. At the same time, the vendor is not limited to the RAD tool capabilities and everything that is possible with Java or JavaScript is also possible with Codejig App Builder. On the other side, end customers can easily make or order customizations when they need them without fearing what will happen when the next release comes out.
Small and medium-size companies can afford things which previously were deemed out of reach, like customizing their software to meet EDI requirements of one of their larger business partners.
If you are still not persuaded, take a look at Salesforce success story. SF was a pioneer in SaaS business and that contributed a lot to its success. However, is it now the only company selling online CRM? Not at all. Its CRM is very good, no doubt — but there are many good CRM systems on the market.
The big difference between Salesforce CRM and all its competitors is the possibility to deeply customize it, extend it with your own business logic and UI and tightly integrate it with other business software and processes of particular enterprise. With all the other things equal (good management, motivated sales team and so on) this possibility is a deciding factor for large enterprises.
With Codejig affordable pricing, customization becomes feasible option for small and medium-sized companies as well.