In my last post I provided an overview of our business solutions to help Federal Government Contracts Win, Deliver and Manage. In general, our solutions compete against offerings from other COTS vendors or solutions that are custom built. R3’s approach is different from these two approaches of the past. We build our solutions on a single, open application platform. We provide a new, third option. In this article, I will describe what this option is and the types of benefits that it brings to you.
First of all you can visit the Resources section of our web site to read more on the open application platform. This platform is comprised of two elements: Microsoft SharePo
int and HumanTouch CorasWorks. As this image depicts, they enable us to provide you with a growing portfolio of solutions. In sum…
- Microsoft SharePoint – is the base collaboration infrastructure providing the data, security, and administration. It is the most widely adopted collaboration platform in the world and broadly adopted amongst Federal Government Contractors.
- HumanTouch CorasWorks – is the application platform that we use to build our solutions without the need to do custom development for each. It is the leading application platform on SharePoint with more than 1,000 customers and millions of users.
What is the difference?
Traditionally, business solutions are custom built. Each solution is hand coded, on a proprietary platform with proprietary code that only the developer truly understands, and, which is challenging to customize to your needs. This legacy situation is really the same at the end of the day with legacy, proprietary COTS solutions and custom built solutions. You get one solution at a time and they are painful and costly to support and change.
An application platform changes the game. It is a layer that enables you to create applications without getting into the code. It abstracts the builder and the user from the underlying technology. It is about configuration vs. code development. The benefit is that you can create and run multiple applications, created by different parties, on a single managed platform. This reduces costs in many ways. In addition, because it is open, the customer is able to customize and enhance the solutions on their own. This leads to optimization and innovation. It creates a new possibility that is simple the best of COTS software and custom software, without, the downsides of both.
Application Platforms are not unique to R3. Salesforce’s Force.com is a similar application platform that meets the same standard and runs in the public cloud. The difference is that our application platform is running on SharePoint which is broadly adopted by the GovCon industry and which runs on premise or in a customers’ managed private cloud. Thus, R3 is bringing the value of business solutions on an open application platform to the Federal Government Contractor industry.
General Advantages of the R3 Open Application Platform
Here are the key 4 advantages of solutions on an open application platform:
- Multiple solutions run on an open platform that which lowers your cost and risk of each solution
- Each solution can be natively integrated with other solutions on this platform (from R3, partners, or that you create on your own)
- You avoid costly and risky custom development work
- You have the ability to customize, enhance and extend each solution to meet your specific needs instead of being dependent on the development of a third party
How this enables us to deliver greater value to you
Leveraging this open application platform, R3 has built off-the-shelf solutions, that are industry specific to Federal Government Contractors, that are purpose-built to meet specific applications and flexible enough to be customized and integrated to meet evolving needs.
More specifically, our approach enables us to:
- Provide comparable best of breed solutions that cost less than legacy proprietary software or custom development
- Focus our investments on the richness of our off-the-shelf business solutions instead of the underlying technology
- Provide industry specific solutions, purpose built for targeted needs, because our cost to do so is less and we can afford to focus
- Rapidly and easily incorporate best practices into our solutions from customers and industry partners
- Leverage our solutions as frameworks to apply to new needs of customers working jointly (see our Jump Start service)
- Provide applications that remove users’ from direct access to SharePoint data (a risky result of using native SharePoint)
- Avoid the constraints, downside and costs of custom development on SharePoint
- Focus efforts and talent on our customer rollout success
- Rapidly innovate and bring new solutions created by us or like-minded partners to our customers
- Provide solutions that are unusually flexible, empowering customers to customize, enhance, and extend them on their own
- Provide customers with multiple purpose-built solutions that natively work together
- Enable us to better support our solutions and the changes made by our customers or others over time
- Integrate our solutions with external systems and applications
- Enable our customers to leverage their platform investments to reduce the total cost and risk
- Enable our customers to reduce their dependencies on legacy, siloed, proprietary systems and expensive custom development projects
All of these aspects simple mean lower cost, less risk and greater business value for our Federal Government Contractor customers. It is a third choice. You can now use proprietary COTS software, do custom development, or, have solutions on an open application platform.
william