Buying software vs investing in your own software assets

Buying software for your business and paying for a zoo of on-line services is an overhead expense. You’re spending money, time and energy. Your goal is to to minimise that. On the other hand, when you are investing in building your bespoke, unified business software platform – you are creating an asset. It’s a competitive advantage, which helps you focus on your growth while yielding increasing ROI day after day. Your goal is to do more of this.

Now more than ever it is practically impossible to do any kind of business without relying on multiple pieces of software and on-line services. At a minimum, your business is probably using software for invoicing, business accounting, payroll, a CRM system for managing client data, another system for supply chain management, a place to store and organise various documents and archives, a place to manage social media and your digital assets (like your website), perhaps you also use e-Commerce services, communication software, customer support ticketing, tools for managing inventory, scheduling, appointments, time-sheets, and so on.

Perhaps a lot of this goes in Excel spreadsheets or something else your staff has hacked together. Some of this software is probably free, some you’ve paid for, some is a recurring monthly expense (whether for licensing or for access to on-line services). Perhaps you’re even paying for professional, integrated solutions from the likes of SAP, Oracle or Microsoft. The point is – all of this software is overhead. It’s an additional expense, which your directors have a duty to continuously try to minimise, because less expenses means more profit. While some of these expenses might be relatively trivial, professional business software can be incredibly expensive.

Unless you know what you’re doing.

The key shift in perspective, which literally sets apart all modern successful businesses, is the realisation that investing in their own, tailored enterprise software platform specifically designed from the ground up to support their unique set of activities and their corporate culture leads to the creation of their most valuable digital asset. It is the only investment that can simultaneously:

• Cut costs and optimise performance;
• Enhance the capabilities of the business and its capacity to deliver;
• Become the secret sauce of your business, leading to unbeatable competitive advantage in an uncontested market space;
• Increase in value exponentially as a function of the business growth rate.

Your bespoke business software platform is your most valuable intellectual property. If designed well and nurtured as the company grows, it will inevitably expand to contain the most complete and detailed blueprint of all operations and business processes – the set of activities that make your business unique and different from the competition.

Imagine someone is interested in acquiring your business. All the money you’ve spent and continue to spend on loose pieces of software goes on the expense side in their calculations. It’s unattractive.

The money, time and expertise you have invested in your own software platform, on the other hand, now looks like pure gold at the very core of your business, dramatically increasing your valuation.

The foundation of a successful business software platforms is a good database

Your database system helps organise, unify and simplify key business data and processes. It is the foundation of all proprietary software assets. As a business owner or decision maker, you should know what makes a good database and how to make informed decisions when it comes to choosing a database management system.

The most commonly used type of database (and probably the most appropriate for most business needs) is what’s known as a “relational” database. This refers to the way data is organised within the database in a way that groups related data together into “tables” and makes it easy to explore the links (or relationships) between different groups of data. When you have your business data stored in a relational database, you have the power to define, manage and report on many different types of relations from one type of data to another. The standard for querying relational data is called SQL – the Structured Query Language, which is one of the greatest tech skills any programmer OR business person can invest in learning.

Any relational database worth using in a business context must be ACID compliant. In simple terms, this means when you put some data into it, you can have full confidence that your data is not going to get lost or corrupted – it will be there, intact, whenever you need it, even in the event of power failure, server break-down, etc.

Of course, this doesn’t guarantee that the software accessing the database can’t damage or loose the data because of software errors or malicious attacks. To safeguard against this, you need a robust and consistent data back-up strategy, secure access control and a safely stored audit trail. These are all things that a good database should support or make relatively easy to implement.

Unless you are already burdened by existing licensing restrictions and contracts, the one database management system we always recommend using is the open-source PostgreSQL database. With over 30 years of active development, PostgreSQL is an industry-standard database complying with all important standards. It has been proven to reliably handle tremendous amounts of data with outstanding performance in a huge spectrum of business and scientific contexts all around the globe.

Many of the most successful on-line businesses rely on PostgreSQL for storing and managing transactional and reporting data. Thanks to its user-friendly design and comprehensive, accessible documentation, PostgreSQL is easy to get started with and entirely suitable for 99% of all data management tasks we have ever encountered in a start-up or an SME. Moreover, it is a safe choice for supporting fast-growing businesses because it is easy to scale – especially with managed cloud solutions like Amazon’s AWS RDS or Aurora, both of which have native support for PostgreSQL.

AWS RDS is an Amazon cloud service that allows you to simply choose the capacity and computational power of your database servers and you can start using an industry-grade database right away – all secured and managed for you following best practices. Alternatively, while Amazon’s Aurora service is a bit more expensive than RDS, it also gives you peace of mind with regular automatic back-ups and automatic capacity scaling, so you never need to worry about capacity planning for your database as your business grows and the amount of data you store increases to possibly unpredictable levels.

How to scale your IT for unexpected hyper-growth

When customer demand overwhelms your capacity to deliver, or pressure from investors requires you to quickly conquer new markets, having a well-designed business software platform can make the difference between tremendous success or missed opportunities.

Regardless of how well your software platform is currently performing, when a wave of new traffic arrives, either as a one-off spike, or (a quality problem to have) as a new reality for your business, your systems will all come under extraordinary stress. Whether or not this translates directly to a financial windfall or a tragic loss of opportunities ultimately comes down to one question: Is your business software platform designed to support your growth? Or is it holding you back?

Here are the basic requirements for a forward-facing, growth-enabling software platform:

• You must have a comprehensive suite of automated functional tests for all aspects of your software, guaranteeing that you can freely and confidently break and re-build any part of it on-the-go, while keeping your production systems fully fit for purpose at all times;
• You must have a professional suite of non-functional tests, which enable you to know (at a minimum) how your system is performing, how far it can be stretched on any dimension and exactly where the performance bottlenecks are;
• It must be straightforward to increase the capacity of your core database on-the-go, without losing data or suffering any downtime. This is where managed solutions like AWS Aurora, which auto-scale in both computational power and capacity can be well worth the cost.
• It must be straightforward to increase the computational capacity of your software on-the-go without interruption. “Serverless” solutions like AWS ECS Fargate, which allow you to seamlessly adjust the number of instances running your software on demand, coupled with a reliable load balancing architecture and a cloud-based content distribution network (CDN) can go a long way in supporting this.
• To take advantage of these scaling solutions, your core software must be designed in such a way that components are loosely coupled (i.e. each component can operate sensibly on its own, without relying on other components) and are able to run concurrently. This usually means that components should not be sharing their internal state with other components, but should only interact via well-defined interfaces (APIs).
• Reliable message queueing solutions must be part of the base software architecture, allowing incoming requests to be safely kept in a temporary queue when the platform is too busy to process them. At the same time (this is too often forgotten!), a sensible back-pressure mechanism has to exist, preventing the queue from overflowing and ultimately informing the originator of the request that the system is currently under stress.
• Security should be part of the original design on all layers of your platform (never an after-thought or an add-on), in order to prevent malicious overloading of your systems with denial-of-service attacks.