March 29, 2013
Depending on the state of the economy, IT organizations usually find themselves vacillating between two extremes when it comes to applications.
When times get tough, there is usually a clarion call to reduce technology-related costs by rationalizing the number of applications supported by IT. That rationalization process tends to favor larger vendors with huge portfolios of applications, because IT leaders usually want to reduce the number of vendors they do business with in order to save money on administrative overhead.
While the economic pendulum in recent years has swung towards application rationalization, the improving economy has led many organizations to rediscover the value of smaller application software vendors that give them access to innovative applications. Larger vendors often can’t compete with those smaller firms in a timely manner.
In addition, IT organizations are now discovering that cloud computing not only reduces the amount of time it takes to deploy an application, it can give them more control over the application environment.
Case in point is Plymouth Rock Energy, a provider of electricity and natural gas services, which worked with Bluewolf Consulting to build a custom ERP application environment on top of the Force.com cloud computing platform created by Salesforce.com.
