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Is the cloud killing off bespoke software solutions for users? This question emerged during one of the panel sessions at the recent Think G-Cloud conference in London and demonstrated that even acknowledged experts may sometimes get the wrong end of the stick about cloud and what it can achieve.
It also pointed at how the development of the CloudStore model – an `app store’ dedicated to the needs of Government and the Public Sector – can be used to create highly tailored, bespoke services without building expensive, hand-crafted bespoke applications.
The Think G-Cloud conference was focussed on discussing the latest iteration of the Government’s G-Cloud campaign, designed to get local governments and other public sector organisations onto the cloud as soon as practical. A core part of this now is the development and growth of CloudStore, an online `app store’ for applications and services geared to the needs of that marketplace.
As such they arguably do face specific problems and have of therefore often resorted to building, or having built, bespoke applications tailored to their specific requirements. This is an approach which does appear at face value to run counter to the model underpinning the cloud – that everything possible is based on standardised, commodity solutions.
Discussion of this prompted a question from audience for the panel - Kate Craig-Wood, Managing Director of Memset; Justin Bowser, chair of the Cabinet Office SME Panel; and Myles Scholfield, Commercial and Contracts Manager at DEFRA. The essence of the question was whether the standard, commodity model should be allowed to grow new applications like Topsy, or whether there should be some slowdown on new developments and consolidation on what is currently available so that users can catch up with what it already available?
Craig-Wood opted for the latter, suggesting that a slow-down would be a good idea. Bowser, on the other hand, suggested that users should learn to live and work with standard, commodity applications and services, as the days of the bespoke application are coming to an end.
It is possible to suggest that, in fact, both positions are wrong. Consolidation around a reduced set of applications nearly always leads to compromise, which in turn tends to lead to increasingly poor performance and restrictions on the number and range of services that can be provided.
And while the days of the traditional bespoke application are certainly coming to an end, the days of `bespoke’ per se are not. Indeed the commoditisation and standardisation of the technology used in the cloud, and in particular the availability and growing de facto standardisation of APIs to integrate applications together to create more complex services, now offers the potential for even greater service design flexibility.
In the same way that a computer screen can display 256,000 colours using 1.44 million tiny pixels, each made of three light-emitting cells – Red, Green and Blue – so APIs provide the foundations for applications of ever-finer granularity to play their point-solution part in the building of ever-more complex and precisely targeted applications.
This a factor that can be of particular benefit for the Public Sector, and Local Government specifically, for it can allow standardised and bespoke approaches to applications and service building – two factors that have been mutually exclusive – to become contented bedfellows.
As APIs, and API management, become more widely accepted and exploited, Local Government departments will be able to share the core elements of many services, and the core costs. They will be able to simply graft in any additional functional point solutions that are required, and leave out functionality that is not required.
Put simply, they will often be able to build bespoke solutions to business problems at near commodity product prices.
This is also, of course, a model that applies equally well to most other businesses in the private sector, particularly as service providers continue to grow the range of point solution applications, tools and utilities they have available.
