Custom IT Solutions: Is the Age of Off-the-Shelf Software & Hardware Over?
IT strategies are known to evolve at a rapid pace, and over the years we’ve witnessed a handful of megatrends. Once there were mainly centralized mainframes, where every application including bookkeeping and payroll were customized and home-grown. Then there were distributed Windows-based client-server systems running mostly commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software with only industry-specific business process logic written in-house. Next we saw highly virtualized servers running multiple OSs, and finally we landed in the current era of the Cloud, mobility, and consumerization – where software and infrastructure can be offered on a subscription basis “as a service,” and there’s an app for… everything.
