The digital divide is real. There are the digital 'haves' and 'have nots'. Crossing over feels like an uphill task because technology expertise is expensive.
Small and medium businesses (SMB) face this dilemma with technology. They need it but are not sure where and how to start. And then Newton's first law takes over! But a business needs to evolve to survive. 'Status quo' is not a good state to be in.
The challenges
From the beginning of IT development, application development has been expensive and time consuming for businesses whose core function is not IT or IT Services. Building software requires highly skilled programmers, architects, testers and QA resources in a team which in turn constitutes an IT department.
The IT department is seen as a cost centre that consumes company resources without generating any revenues!
Technology and business landscapes keep changing. Delays in delivering applications can render the initial requirements outdated and can necessitate a change in technology or design even before going live! IT teams can get caught up in such a vicious cycle.
This cycle is unproductive and a resource drain for the primary business owners. The impact of this is usually felt by SMBs who typically have limited budgets for such expenses.
Such prolonged and expensive development /maintenance release cycles dissuade several businesses and cause them to miss out on the technological advancements and fail to reap the benefits of adopting the trends in technology.
Once an application is built and the business requires a mobile application to augment or extend the application, another expensive development/maintenance cycle begins for mobile devices.
Even for software solution providers the struggle has been in working out a balance between pricing and customer expectations. This has been due to the cost of skills as well as the underlying product development technology. Add to it the inflexibility of the approach where the requirements needed to be clearly defined right upfront. Such expectations discourage a digitally uninitiated to even consider building a solution.
The future - bridging the divide
Technology has made it possible to provide high grade solutions at an affordable price. Even an individual business owner can get a custom solution that is enterprise-grade at a reasonable price. The entry barrier to owning software solution has been reduced immensely.
The cost of building a software solution is reduced because of technologies like low-code. Building an application does not require an army of coders. The business owner does not need to know the nuances of underlying programming language. It is all encapsulated and put under the 'hood'. Making changes to the application is easy and often does not require any coding experience.
The low-code platforms use a lot of prebuilt and pretested software components. Building a software solution is like using the lego blocks to create a bridge or a house or a tower. The lego approach gives a leg up in building software solutions fast.
Benefits to small and medium businesses
With the low-code technology it is now possible to provide individual business owners and small businesses a tailor-made software. We at FeldsparTech have worked with many of them to get a prototype within a few days and then build a fully functional application at less than 50% of the cost of traditional development.
Going digital is no longer expensive or out-of-reach for any business owner. The low-code technology ensures digital solutions for all at an affordable price. It also ensures that SMBs do not have to compromise on the quality of the software solution. They get enterprise-grade software within days, custom made for their specific needs. The process followed in developing software solutions is transparent. It is a partnership model where timely demos are done and feedback is taken. If the feedback requires changes, then the changes are implemented within no time. Changes are easy to make with low-code technology like the one provided by FeldsparTech. Check out our development process here.
It is not just the software application development that has become affordable, it is also the maintenance of the newly developed application that is easy and hence inexpensive. The total cost of ownership ( TCO) of the software applications is reduced drastically with the use of low-code technology like ours.
If you want to start with digitization and are not sure how to start, we can help you. We can be your partner from beginning until the very end when you start seeing the benefits of digitization.
We can discuss your challenges and get you a prototype within days. Once you are satisfied with the prototype you can decide on the full implementation of your solution.
Let us bridge the digital divide together. One cloud application at a time. Let us make good software available to all.