Lean Business Through a Custom Apps Platform

If your company is not competing worldwide, you are working for a company that is increasingly an exception to the rule. Businesses today find themselves competing directly or indirectly with companies thousands of miles away that operate within entirely different environments, cost structures and laws. Yes, in theory your company can also sell its products and services worldwide, but for most American and European companies this remains just a theory. The rapid pace of globalization and the differences in wages, laws and environmental regulations have created major competitive challenges for businesses in the developed world. For most, the solution has been to look for more and more ways to cut costs.

This insatiable thirst to lower operating expenses is understandable, although some of the consequences such as cutting staff is painful. One of the ways to improve productivity is through technology. The term technology covers a wide variety of areas, but our focus here is on simplifying the creation of custom business software.

Business software is at the heart of businesses. Aside from the short list of generalized software, everything else is either custom or highly-modified software. There is a good reason for this. No two businesses are identical. Differences in people, preferences, offerings, culture and objectives demands unique ways of operation. The traditional way of creating custom business software calls for assembling a team of developers or hiring a software development company. Ultimately, both approaches lead to crafting code one-line-at-a-time. This process of creating software has changed little over the past few decades. It’s slow and expensive because it requires expensive development skills. And the finished product is expensive to maintain and expensive to change.

In 2000, Caspio introduced point-and-click app creation. Furthermore, by building an integrated database at its core and offering the entire solution “as a service”, it eliminated many of the complexities that go into piecing together the different parts of an app; the user interface, logic, data storage, permissions, etc … With Caspio, a business user can create powerful web apps without coding using step-by-step wizards. The finished app runs on Caspio’s highly secure and reliable platform and is supported by a U.S.-based staff of experts that is easily accessible by phone, chat and email.

There is little wonder why businesses of all sizes are finding this model extremely attractive. The time-to-market and savings are remarkable.

This new way of creating apps is not only appealing to business users who can see themselves empowered to bring their vision and ideas to life; it’s also very appealing to the IT departments and developers. There are many reasons for this. First, IT is relieved to offer each department a tool for day-to-day data management and reporting. They are comfortable knowing that the Caspio platform-as-a-service is sound and reliable serving thousands of customers for over a decade. Second, it frees up the valuable and scarce IT resources to focus on the most complex business needs.

Our vision is to change the way people create apps. We believe and have proven that there is a better way to build and operate apps than crafting code and setting up servers. We are encouraged to see that leading companies are agreeing with us. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2014 over 25% of business apps will be created this way.

The future is very exciting. The proliferation of mobile devices and advances in app technologies such as HTML5 bring about many new opportunities for businesses to offer a better experience to their employees, partners and customers. Caspio is committed to simplifying the adoption of these new technologies and helping customers create apps that work on all the upcoming devices. Our customers’ investment in Caspio is protected as the platform adapts to new advances that are happening all so fast. This is something that cannot be said about an app that is written in code.

These are indeed exciting times and our focus continues to remain on changing the way apps are created.