Can Ramco change enterprise app economics with VirtualWorks?

Ramco was once touted as one of the rare Indian vendors to have a recognised ERP package and was even seen by some as a worthy challenger to giants like SAP. But somewhere along the way the challenge fizzled out. Now Ramco is all set to challenge the giants again with a revolutionary new platform called ‘Ramco VirtualWorks,’ which the company claims will change the economics of application software. Srikanth R P has the details

Most enterprise applications have been built based on the 80:20 rule—incorporate 80 percent of the functionality that is common across all businesses and that will fit most user needs. But while this approach of ‘standard configurable’ applications brings best practices to an organisation, the same approach also becomes a hindrance when a company decides on a new business model, only to discover that its enterprise application is unable to change according to the new business need. It is no surprise that CIOs often complain that they have to change their business processes in order to adjust to the system and not vice-versa. In such scenarios, software is no longer an agent of change but becomes an enemy of change.

The answer to this problematic issue could lie in a new platform that Chennai-based Ramco Systems has developed. Called ‘Ramco VirtualWorks,’ the new platform allows a business to first define business processes and then create applications on-the-fly, using automated code development. Change your business process and your application changes immediately.

This means that customers can visualise the type of solution they wish to have and Ramco can show them how the software will function—all this in the initial stages of software development. What’s more, customers can also create applications by choosing modules from a library of hundreds of ready-to-use business processes. Ramco claims that this approach will help in rapid implementation of the ambitious projects that many Indian state governments plan, without being able to set deadlines for implementation. What’s more, if some state policies change these changes can be incorporated in the business processes and the applications change automatically. How’s that for flexibility?

Says Kamesh Ramamoorthy, vice president, Enterprise Applications, Ramco, "In today’s dynamic business environment business processes change frequently. The IT solution supporting the business should also have the ability to quickly adapt to changes and support the business. We believe that we have addressed the issues of the industry with the development of Ramco VirtualWorks. As the product enables blueprints or visualisation of the solution being developed, the customer can visualise his solution at every stage of the software development lifecycle. Once the requirements are rightly captured, implementation is much faster than conventional methods and the quality of the solution is also far superior."

The visualising part is particularly important as it can help a customer plan the solution he needs and arrive at accurate specifications without cost and time over-runs. Ramco claims that that a typical customer can expect cost savings of 30 to 40 percent and time savings of 40 to 50 percent in any project.

Model architecture

The key technology behind VirtualWorks is the model architecture that Ramco has developed. Model architecture is an application development framework that allows software applications to be described in terms of what they must do rather than how they must do it. The architecture makes it possible for the customer to visualise the solution so that everyone connected with the solution, i.e. business analysts, end-users and developers, can ensure that business needs are met, before implementation in software code renders change difficult and expensive.

After specifying the business needs VirtualWorks automatically generates the code for the application instead of a programmer converting the specifications manually. As the application code depends on business processes the application can be customised for a variety of platform choices. The platform’s efficiency has already been proved in one instance when a large customer in the US wanted to shift application development from SQL to a J2EE environment mid-way. This would have been considered impossible in most development environments. But using VirtualWorks, the same was accomplished in a week’s time. This is because unlike other traditional applications, business processes and business rules are independent from the software code and the software code is developed from the model. Ramco itself has invested substantial time and efforts and has spent close to 1,500 man-years in developing the architecture.

And from the reactions of independent analysts, the gigantic effort does seem to have paid off. Says Mani Bharadwaj, director, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, "We were quite impressed with the platform as it can be customised through business rules and business rules can be quite complex."

Advantage Ramco

While product vendors previously focused on including most basic features that a company could possibly need in a particular vertical, Ramco’s platform allows a product company to develop packaged applications more rapidly at reduced investments—all specifically tuned for the customer. Ramco itself has taken advantage of this platform to develop a series of enterprise suites for different industries. If any new business needs arise, all Ramco has to do is add new business processes for the specific industry and develop unique packaged solutions.

As the platform can be used to generate component-based applications from specified business requirements, vendors can quickly fix or add features without affecting other modules. With componentisation, a customer can incrementally upgrade only selected components, without having to upgrade the entire ERP solution. External service providers can use the business process modelling tools to define business requirements and VirtualWorks will generate the required components with no hassles of integration.

Ramco is also using the same platform for developing custom solutions. For developing custom solutions, Ramco uses VirtualWorks to automatically generate around 80 percent of the code once business processes are defined. The rest of the 20 percent can be routed to development personnel. Since the architecture is Web-based, coding requirements can be routed offshore.

Marketing

While currently the company is not talking about marketing of this platform to other players, one can certainly expect the company to market this platform to independent software players once a referral customer base is established. Besides faster product development and increase in the speed of project delivery, independent software players can also use VirtualWorks to form composite applications like integrating third-party applications with the business components generated by VirtualWorks. Additionally, system integrators can use Ramco VirtualWorks to integrate other applications from different vendors or different legacy systems.

Conclusion

From the initial reactions of numerous independent analysts, the response has been extremely encouraging and some analysts have even gone on to add that ‘Ramco’s platform is the future of enterprise applications’. The real challenge for Ramco now is to address the common problem faced by every Indian organisation—the marketing aspect. With a revolutionary product architecture that hopes to address the issues of every enterprise user, Ramco could have a goldmine on its hands that could change the way we look at enterprise computing today.

Current issues with enterprise applications