The economic downturn is tough on all of us, and the natural inclination is to slash budgets, and in particular IT budgets in order to adjust to the turmoil. However, much like economic experts and financial planners say that you need to view your individual investment portfolio as a long term investment and not focus on the day to day churn in the market, I think the same goes for your IT budget. Additionally, by consistently investing in and enhancing your IT infrastructure, you can streamline your business operations and ultimately save your company money.
Simply increasing or maintaining the IT budget isn't enough, however. Companies need to examine how they are investing their IT budget in order to increase their efficiency. Investing in IT infrastructure to improve the efficiency of the business instead of simply maintaining what already exists is paramount to saving money in the long term, and I believe this is where companies should focus their investments. Unfortunately, way too many IT organizations find themselves focused on maintaining their applications.
If IT organizations have to constantly reimplement or rearchitect their applications to integrate and utilize the newest technology and platform features, then they aren't focused on adding new capabilities to their applications that serve to make them more effective and efficient. Maintaining the application becomes the priority and developing new functions is secondary.
So when you look for an application development platform you want to look for one that applications are built to last. One where you can be assured that your investment in your application will be maintained despite all the changes and technology shifts that may occur in the market place.
For example, many OpenEdge customers have been using the OpenEdge platform for 5, 10, or even 15 years or more. Over time there have been several shifts in the way applications are built and deployed and the technology environments in which they execute. Each of these shifts brings with them new opportunities, and while many of these shifts have required Progress OpenEdge customers to make changes and enhancements to their applications, these customers have always been assured that the core business logic that is part of their application didn't need to change in order to take advantage of these opportunities.