6 Ways to Get the Most Out of Your IT Budget

Any business that has something to do with developing software is inevitably going to be successful and profitable 100 percent of the time, since the very moment of its foundation. Mobile games, business applications, websites, specific software for particular realms of life (medicine, military, entertainment, etc.), and many other variations of software have always eventually brought their owners large sums of money — and we talk about billions of dollars of pure profit here. Do you know just how much money you can make by starting your own project? Half a million? A million? Or even more? Today, we will discuss how to get the most out of your software product in terms of profits.

The Most Effective Solutions for Achieving the Maximal Profits from Your Software Development Investments

So then, let’s find out what you can do to maximize the payback on your IT budget.

1. Choosing SaaS

Software realized by the SaaS model is hosted on the servers of the SaaS contractor-company or by the data providers and telecom services. Because of this, they bear full responsibility for the stability and dutifully providing software services to the client. In turn, you as consumer-company gain access to the software by the means of a regular web-browser via the internet.

This approach guarantees you a range of advantages. The thing is that you won’t have to pay for the complete software package at full price. Instead, you will have to just pay the bill for renting the rendering power for the fixed price (which depends on the functions and the overall number of software clients required for your company to successfully operate). It is indeed a very convenient method due to the fact that a few users will actually need to attain access to the software, provided your business has started just recently. Following the logic, in this case, buying the “stationary” software means considerable losses to the budget of your company. Besides, the is always the risk of your company changing its course of development and the brought software will lose its relevance and become useless.

What is also important in this scheme is that your company won’t ever have to do certain things, such as:

• Buying high-costing server equipment;
• Keeping separate IT-specialists and programmists in the personnel for maintenance and supporting special software;
• Providing the servers with professional maintenance to keep them running at all times;
• Installing updates and performing many other types of work unrelated to the specific business-niche and so on.

2. Outsourcing

Outsourcing has always been popular among companies requiring special software for their operation while not being in any way software-oriented enterprises. But because of the common continuous complexification of the IT technology — many developer-companies and software-oriented ones have begun to opt for outsourcing services due to the lack of highly specialized experts in workplaces.

Formally, there is a range of benefits in using outsourcing:

• It saves you finances. The effect is achieved by an outsourcing company “selling” the services of their specialists to numerous different companies at once;
• The quality of the work is higher. Due to the fact that a company providing outsourcing services specializes in a certain type of activity, it can afford to spend a lot more time to developing and mastering their services in numerous directions — starting from increasing the qualification level of their employees to purchasing high-costing software/hardware for work.
• Guarantee and reliabilities. According to the labor legislation, if your employee feels sick and has a corresponding certificate that can prove it — you have no right to oblige him to go to work until he is fully recovered. When it comes to an outsourcing company, what you do is you draw a contract that states deadlines for the tasks you need to be done, so you don’t have to face issues concerning the human factor here.

3. BYOD

Many companies still traditionally allocate separate computing equipment for their business-applications. The process of gaining access to the corporate network, in this case, looks like this: a specialist gets himself a temporary simple notebook for work, it requires:

• Setting up;
• Installing all the necessary software;
• Arranging the access plan for all the user groups among the personnel (most of them are not going to be granted the administrative rights — any update or software installation is going to be regulated by the “upper” system administrator). 

The computing powers, as well as the accessibility of this approach, is quite limited — the notebook, in this case, is far from “field conditions” use, despite its portability.

The concept of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) allows you to optimize the employees’ interactions with corporate software — they can now decide on the programs and solutions they want to install and use on the devices on their own, as well as the devices themselves. They can set it up however they want to and use a corporate service of their liking. Besides, the most traditional devices for BYOD are tablets and smartphones — they connect to any available Wi-Fi network without a problem, which makes up for a great opportunity to stay in touch with the corporate software 24/7 inside and outside the office premises.

4. Server Virtualization

In our days, some companies with obsolete views on developing software are using the old methods of exploiting the premium-class network equipment as much as possible in its physical form-factor, which is — arranging whole server rooms and gradually increase the number of physical servers. It is a decent strategy only in case of creating a network structure that won’t ever grow bigger than it is.

In all the other cases, it is better to choose more flexible options. For example, you can resort to the cloud service provider. It will allow you to pay only for the computing power you are using at the moment and not concern about the technical side of the deal such as hardware maintenance because all the cloud servers are a problem of their provider and not yours.

5. Integrating Separate Systems Into a Single One

If you have a quite large company, you are most likely using more than a single software solution for the whole business. So, when you have at least a couple of them, your employees will have a hard time syncing all the data and transferring it back and forth from one software to another.

What you can do to help them with this problem is you can think of the comfort in advance and provide a mutual integration of the current software solutions you have. In a long run, this approach will not only save you a considerable amount of working time of your personnel but also secure the processes of work from possible mistakes and delays connected with all the data update waiting. To do this, you can try out the ERP-modules instead of the autonomous software blocks.

6. The Practice of Using DevOps, automatization, and AI-based solutions

And finally, you can try to solve your budgeting problems by implementing the most recent trends from the IT industry — by modernizing your software with the help of end-to-end automatization, artificial intelligence, and the DevOps methodology. All these strategies are extremely fast to pay for themselves (excluding the cases when your software is obsolete to the point that it has to be rewritten from the blank sheet). 

DevOps deserves special mentioning — it is a progressive software development concept, implying active interaction between the specialist-developers and the professionals from the sphere of info-technological servicing. This way, the software development-release processes become interconnected and inseparable, which helps the company to create and update their software solutions times faster.

Implementing the DevOps method almost always means practicing Agile methodology: in our case, a large stressing is put on the end result experimentation which is additionally reinforced by receiving detailed feedback from the divisions on each stage of development. It is, of course, increases risks of the initially planned out map of the software end result being significantly different from the real final result. However, at the end of the day, this approach ensures the maximal satisfaction of all the interested parties, despite any swerves from the initial plan.