Too Much Customization of Applications is Bad
By Suman Ravikumar, SiliconIndia   |   Monday, 17 October 2011, 17:19 IST
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Too Much Customization of Applications is Bad
An Interview with Shrikant Navelkar,Sr. VP, Business Development of Clover Infotech Could you briefly explain what Clover Infotech is all about and what is its core business? Clover Infotech is a 17 year old company. The company is completely focused in providing services. Clover started its business initially by providing services of Oracle to customers. Over the period of time, Clover has adopted Microsoft, Opensource, but pre-dominantly still focuses on Oracle as we have our business in the financial services. The head office is in Mumbai. It is a 500 count people company. Our complete business is from the domestic market. Clover is now slowly making its presence in the south in Bangalore and Chennai. Also Clover has made its foot prints in Pune and Ahmedabad. We are working with large enterprise customers as well as small mid-sized customers in terms of infrastructure, application platform support and also providing them the technology solutions which will solve their business related problems. What are the applications that you mainly focus on? Or what is the platform that you concentrate on? We do not develop any application in particular. For Large Financial customers we maintain third party applications. But our main focus is on Oracle financial services, Oracle e-businesses, standard applications like Microsoft, SQL server that customers are using. We also practice Open source, Linux and related technologies. According to you what will be the future of Applications in Business Enterprises? From past 5 to 7 years, customers are buying lot applications because businesses are growing and business needs are changing. And the change in the business needs is very drastic which makes the changes happen within 3 to 6 months. So customers especially IT managers generally do not have the time to have a complete holistic look of the business which end ups making them buy customizable software or develop one of their own. This results in hoarding of many applications at the customer's site. This is the scenario from past 5 to 8 years. In the course, a lot of standard and non standard applications are being used. This has left many CIOs thinking. Now they are concentrating more on how to consolidate their infrastructure, starting from the data level. Consolidation at the data level will fetch those accurate data. By talking to various applications simultaneously, it will help them in their decision making as well. Now the challenge is to integrate all these applications which will be a strong repository that will maintain their data. Integrating the applications at the data level is one tough nut to crack but the true challenge lies in this and not many people can do it. Hence I see the future in building these efficient data repositories. Which is a more sustainable practice, Standard application or Customized? Standard applications are more dependable as they are based on worldwide best practices and they are robust in nature. Most importantly you don't have to deal with coding of the applications. A home grown application gives you the leeway to customize the applications as per your requirement, but too much freedom of customizing is also bad. Biggest problem you have with customized applications is that every single change has to be done at the code level. So application becomes a larger, unmanageable and cumbersome process. From last 5 years the implementation of standard applications has improved. Standard Applications are no more complicated and rigid. They are much simplified when it comes to its implementation in a company's business system. Also there are implementation partners now who make sure that the application is implemented rightly. Applications like SAP, Microsoft, OpenSource have evolved over the years and their R&D in the application world has resulted in making business solutions an easy task. Any Startup for that matter today have more confident in vouching for a standard application than a customized one.

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