Rating: +0
If you do allow the integration of third party products, what are some of your "must haves" or "must knows"?
Kathleen,
Care greatly. I do not want to see my core application “overly reliant” on any 3rd party software. My concerns are what happens if the 3rd party solution company goes away, gets merged with another company etc. There is too much risk for the end customer. A good market example is Alta Vista. Many companies, OEM’d Alta Vista under the covers to provide index and search, with both functions being “core” to the primary application (and with some major consequences for long-term data retention).
AltaVista became vulnerable to takeover and this happened several times until it landed with Overture which was eventually bought by Yahoo, who eventually End of Life’d AltaVista, causing a major disruption for all of the AltaVista OEM customers and end-customers who have AltaVista indices pointing to data that has to live for 20+ years.
And, while this is not the type of functionality that a primary application vendor would go off and build themselves, there are open source options that would protect the above scenario from happening. So, what I would look for is; if the 3rd party application is provided by another “commercial” company or an “open source” equivalent. A commercial entity can suffer the same fate as the AltaVista example above and that poses risk to the end customer while open source minimizes that risk.
If a 3rd party “commercial” vendor is utilized, I would want to see a “loosely coupled” integration with the primary application, so that I as the end user can unplug the 3rd party solution and plug-in another 3rd party solution without a major over-haul or coding effort.
An example, could be a loosely vs. tightly coupled reporting or analytical offering. If the primary application is “tightly” integrated with one analytical application, it makes it difficult to easily switch and use another; and this is the protection the end customer needs. As the end customer, I would rather give up some of the “out of the box” functionality of a loose vs. tight integration and have the flexibility to choose or move to another 3rd party offering than have the general product ship a tightly integrated commercial product that locks me in and makes it harder to switch.
If the application is critical to my business, I am also going to want to understand what the support options between the main application provider and 3rd party application provider look like; I want to know that a strong contractual technology partner relationship exists for support, testing, roadmap coordination, etc. Essentially, I want to review the contracts between companies to understand any risk that their relationship poses to the long-term supportability of the application.
Good Luck,
Peter
March 2008