The return of the small business ISV?

I've been doing a lot of research and thinking about Clouds lately. I know, Clouds is an overused and abused term, but the more I thought about the business uses of a cloud and less about the technology, one thing kept sticking in my mind: the ISV is coming back.

For those around during the rise of the MIS/IT department, business groups used to get what they needed done using computers by hiring a one or few person shop to build software to their exact needed. Ask most 40+ year old developers (and Directors and VPs!) and you'll find that they cut their teeth writing custom code for everything from TRS-80's and HP-1000's to VisiCalc and dBase to sell to small businesses or to larger businesses that didn't have IT yet.

See, before MIS/IT put a clamp down on all non-'approved' applications, it wasn't unusual for a business person who 'knew a computer guy' to hire him (or her, even in those days!) to do exactly what they wanted. So a dBase application to run HR or the dentist office or to handle commissions. In the 80's and 90's I heard a lot of 'so Bob from my Church group did this for us'.

As MIS/IT took control, these small ISVs were starved out by bigger consulting agencies that the IT guys had relationships with (there is a lot more to the decline of the ISV, but I won't get into it today.). Today in most organizations it is impossible to get an application build and installed for a department without IT involvement.

The main reason departments don't do (much) outside work is they don't have any place to run it. With desktops locked down and networks monitored a department couldn't just install an application on a machine bought at Best Buy for their use. I'll talk about all the Access applications that sprung up because of this in a minute.

Now Software as a Service (SaaS) has started to whittle away at this reliance on IT since the apps aren't deployed locally and pretty much all IT sees is the HTTP traffic.

Yes, an department head could get a Rackspace account and run their own hardware, but that is really pushing the box even for someone likes sales (just kidding.) It would also mean they need OS help, which wasn't that easy to come by.

Things are changing though. Take a look at Microsoft's Azure or Google's AppEngine (or the dozen or more similar systems for PHP, Ruby, Java etc.). Here the applications are running inside a container. Containers with well define interfaces with tons of information on the web about how to access them. Containers without any OS access, so you don't need to know Windows, Linux, Tomcat, IIS etc.

Unlike SaaS which typically requires a contract that involves the legal department, Azure and AppEngine can be paid for with a credit card. It wouldn't be a stretch that soon business people are going to 'know a computer guy' who can build apps in these containers. For very little money. Like the kind of money a department manager or director has signing authority over.

Remember those Access databases I talked about a minute ago? Well most of them came out because the business people used Access in school or their interns did and Access is a typical part of Office. So tons of simple (and eventually not-so simple) applications are built with Access, under IT's nose.

What do you think the interns are learning in school now? Not Access so much, but Big Table in AppEngine or SQL Server in Azure. Soon those 'hidden' applications are going to be deployed in the cloud instead of local machines.

So why do I think the small business ISV is coming back? How many business users have problems that could be solved by a small application. One that they'd pay $2000 or $3000 for? How many would be able to hide that amount from IT and the CFO?

Who do you think she'd get for $3000 to build a basic app? Not the big consulting companies, probably not even the local ones IT uses. It will be back to individual developers who will do it at night and over the weekend.

That guy you know from Church.