“The Cloud will make everything easier for the customer!” Bold but true statement. But how does it look for the software vendors? Let me share with you a few thoughts.
Running cloud applications makes it easier for software vendors as they only have to support a certain number of releases.
Officially all customers always run on the same release. So it sounds like we only have to deal with one release. Here’s the reality check based on the current ByDesign releases:
- Next week ByDesign Feature Pack 3.5 will be released for new customer installations.
- Existing customers will upgrade to that release a few weeks later.
- Some of these existing customers are still running on Feature Pack 2.6 and will upgrade to Feature Pack 3.0 in the next 3 weeks.
- Development is already ongoing for Feature Pack 4.0.
- And in parallel the next feature pack (4.5) is already being planned and specified.
So, if we count all the releases the product management of ByDesign is involved in, we get to five.
You see, even though our customers don’t feel anything about this complexity, internally this requires a lot of coordination and a lot of knowledge about 5 different releases.
Are you facing similar challenges? Let me know how you are dealing with them!
