LEAP - Lightly Engineered Application Products

This morning, Zoho is announcing a SaaS HR application aimed at small to mid-sized businesses. Fits in well with its overall branding " we want to be the IT department for SMBs". And my immediate reaction when they first showed it to me was this is a LEAP. 

Credit Rod Boothby at Joyent (a sponsor for the New Florence blog) with the acronym. He was describing to me recently a phenomenon he is seeing around their cloud computing platform. While thousands of Facebook developers are using their utility model, a number of large enterprise are also doing skunkworks "light development" on their platform - easy to provision, and easy to pay by the drink. 

Then, reader Munjal Dave sends me this Harvard Business Review article Radically Simple IT:
"In our research, we discovered a standout among the companies applying the path-based method: Japan’s Shinsei Bank. It succeeded in developing and deploying an entirely new enterprise system in one year at a cost of $55 million: That’s one-quarter of the time and about 10% of the cost of installing a traditional packaged system." 

Finally, I notice Coda singing the praises of having taken advantage of force.com from salesforce.com (as I have been urging other SaaS vendors to do rather than invest in their own platform and services)" ...we just had to plug CODA 2go into the existing workflow that comes with the platform. It’s a similar story with reporting – instead of having to build a reporting tool or data dictionaries into standard BI-type tools, they are already there with the platform. So that way we’ve saved loads of time and been able to focus more on getting the fundamental design right" 

In different ways, each reflects the growing un-layering of complexity in traditional application development and deployment. 

Call that the unbearable lightness of being the new IT...

Update: Rod Boothby adds his perspective

Comments

[Anshu Sharma]

Yes, Coda2Go blog provides an interesting perspective on the value of build vs. buy when it comes to platforms.

Like the acronym LEAP. ;)

(Disclosure: I work for/on Salesforce.com's Force.com Platform.)

[Darayush Mistry]

LEAP .. Lightly Engineered Application Products .. interesting concept and acronym.
I guess in a way this further validates for me the trend where new applications, products or IT projects would have to start taking a close look at the build vs buy PaaS equations to determine if they can "really" have any time, cost or control benefit of building their own from scratch.