Enterprise Architect Expertise

conrd

Good afternoon,
Currently setting up a business and want to create a software platform for operation.

Have looked at Sage, SAP and a few others, but we have decided to build something custom as the business model is somewhat complex and we need to be super flexible.

Has anyone got any experience of this or if there is a preferred software language to handle a number of different data types?

Looking forward to hearing from you all,

Thanks in advance,
Regards
Conor

Merrion

Without a bit of detail on the problem domain and things like # of users expected etc. it is very difficult to say.

If you are developing your own application I would strongly recommend you use a cloud provider such as Amazon or Microsoft Azure because you can scale it up and down rapidly without the up-front cost of having your own servers.

srsly78

Are you a software company? If not then why are you looking at creating software? Creating your own bespoke solution will likely be more expensive than buying an off-the-shelf package.

Can you not just use a pimped out spreadsheet like most other small businesses?

conrd

Thanks for the response, we are clearly not a software company!
Pimped out spreadsheets are not really going to cut it, as we hope to use it for some bespoke CRM and machinery capacity planning.

I suppose we could go with a package, but we were kind of hoping there might be an option for something like Drupa for enterprise, that we could scale and customise at a very detailed level.

The scalability issue was not discussed, so the advice on Azure was most helpful.....thanks

gargargar

You have been very vague on details. Do you need a software platform to help with your fulfilment process, or is it a case that you want some kind of modelling software? How many users of this system will there be? Will they all be your employees?

The data types question is largely irrelevant when it comes to choosing a language.

amen

If you are developing your own application I would strongly recommend you use a cloud provider such as Amazon or Microsoft Azure because you can scale it up and down rapidly without the up-front cost of having your own servers

but thats assuming the software was written correctly to use these capabilities.

You would also need to look at the costs of cloud hosting, db backup, log shipping in the cloud.

micosoft

conrd wrote: »

Have looked at Sage, SAP and a few others, but we have decided to build something custom as the business model is somewhat complex and we need to be super flexible.

Some of the largest and most complex companies in the world use SAP which is very flexible with enough time and money.

I'd strongly suggest you avoid bespoke software - it's very unusual that any company does something so rare or different that they cannot find something that can be configured or even customised to work. Capacity planning is nothing new - in fact it was one of the earliest uses of computer systems starting with LEO (Lyons Electronic Office) in the forties.

With regard to flexibility - I guarantee you that something built for you will be less flexible than a commercial systems which have to be flexible given their many clients as opposed to custom which is just for you.

Presume you mean Drupal?

Without knowing the detail I would say:

AWS/Azure or Infrastructure - you should not be going that low on the stack (these two seem to be stock answers on here). If you have potential scaling issues you should not be on the web looking for answers but hiring a professional.

If you still want to look at something "custom" look at Force.com (Platform as a service) which plays very nicely with SalesForce CRM. There are a fair few people developing on it and it's excellent environment for rapidly developing flexible, process orientated applications. You don't need to worry about languages etc as all of that is abstracted to a large extent - you only need to care about business logic.

At the top of the stack you can utilise Salesforce CRM as your software as a service CRM with force.com.

The above is a relatively cheap approach and fits half way between the off the shelf and custom.