Chapter 4: Real World Case 1 1. Companies should consider several factors when they make decisions whether to build their own applications or to buy them from vendors or to use SaaS route, and these factors are given below: a) Cost of developing, running and maintaining applications software. This factor is one of the major factors which may influence the decisions about software applications. Because costs of creating IT infrastructure (servers, system software and IT workers), that are crucial to obtain and support application software including continual challenges of distributes and managing companywide software patches and upgrades, may lead many companies to give up developing their own programs and use vendors help with their application needs b) Time of application set up and running. Time can be another important factor when the businesses are between choosing software alternatives available to them. The applications service providers’ pay-as-you-go or instant service provision right after subscription or purchase of them may play vital role in giving up developing their own software applications. c) Privacy of data that the firms possess, If the business really worried about security of their data, then they will develop and run their own applications. 2. Companies may face several risks when they decide to contract with small and less experienced applications vendors. * One of the main risks related to going with small or less experienced vendors, is that technology and support teams may have difficulty in handling new issues with running and maintaining the application that may occur first time. And that may cause the company much money to solve those new issues. * Bankruptcy Risk – Obviously, if a company is new and less experienced, then it is more likely to go bankrupt, and it will in its turn lead to no further upgrades or support. * Layoff Risk -When companies effect layoffs, products of small vendors more probable to suffer from this, which impacts both the technology on an ongoing basis as well as the support. * Risk of Sale – It is ongoing trend nowadays that small companies are purchased by large companies, there is always the risk that technology and support teams will leave. This can even be the case if their shares vest over time if there are significant cultural or power conflicts or if the incentives are insufficient.
To secure the businesses from above mentioned risks, companies may choose large company with longstanding technology because: high experience in handling most of the problems related to software running and maintaining, bankruptcy risk is generally minimal and less a risk of being sold than for smaller companies. 3. Companies with configured/standardized are always more likely to have less headaches compared to the ones with customized systems. However, in the situations where none of configuration options work, the business still should develop new configuration option to meet their needs because standardization leads to agility of the company while in most cases highly customization may put you into horrible situations.
Chapter 5: Real World Case 3 1. Customers of the company undergoing a merger or acquisition will have several important expectations from the manager of the company while still in process. The following are some of them: a) No errors while acquiring and integrating data of customers: Any errors made while transferring data while merging and acquiring may cause many troubles for the clients of the companies. So, customers of any company facing merger expect the managers not to make any data errors while accomplishing their jobs. IT may offer some assistance in meeting their expectations in following way. For example, application virtualization may help the company to move the data from one store to another with minimum errors. b) Customer data leakage: the threat of data leakage is another concern of