Tailor-made or off the shelf?

A client who needs a piece of software to fulfil organisational needs is usually faced with two choices: buying a solution "off the shelf" or having it tailor-made.

Off-the-shelf solutions

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Off-the-shelf solutions have the advantage of being both cheap and robust. Large user bases allow developers to keep their prices low, but they still enjoy enough revenues to hire large teams to make sure the application works properly.

The disadvantage with these systems is simple, however: they usually offer too much and too little at the same time. The user interface of an off-the-shelf system will often contain fields and buttons that nobody in an organisation will ever use, making the application harder to navigate. On the other hand, other – at times crucial – features may be lacking, or a system will only allow you to solve a task in a roundabout way.

The low cost of an off-the-shelf system comes with its own price tag: that of having to spend more time to make the system work for you.

Tailor-made solutions

Tailor-made (or "bespoke") systems, on the other hand, allow clients to avoid these pitfalls. Direct interaction with a software developer can lead to solutions that fit the client's needs perfectly. No field is redundant, not a button is out of place.

Using bespoke software development comes with its own costs, however: developer salaries need to be paid, and such systems can accrue "technical debt": underlying software code that is understood at best by the original developer, at worst by nobody.

Pianola

Pianola aims to bridge this dichotomy of approaches by offering the best of both worlds: by giving clients the possibility to create bespoke solutions within a clearly defined framework, the wheel does not need to be reinvented for each application, but the client can still determine the scope of its functionality.

What's more: there is only one piece of software to be maintained. There is no technical debt that is being stacked up (if anything, the code becomes cleaner and more robustly tested over time), and the products can more easily be passed on to other developers, as they only have to acquaint themselves with one code base, not several.