Enterprise Application Delivery Method For Self-service Exploration And Research

Small and medium-sized business (SMB) requires its software solution with features of low price, high flexibility, maintainability, usability, fitness, and immediate return of investment, due to its limited resources on IT infrastructures, IT staff, and its viabilities in business requirements. Traditional offerings including pre-packaged software solution, custom programming and SaaS model can not fulfill these requirements. We proposed a customer centric self-serve oriented business solution offering approach, with which the SMB users can obtain a software solution that meets their specific requirements in a self-serve fashion, based on the advancement of IT technologies, especially the WEB technologies, and on the experiences we gained in the enterprise application development in the past decades.To support and realize this new approach, we devised: (1) self-serve oriented data processing, which includes a hybrid data object definition language, a novel database schema for efficient storage and processing of arbitrary type of data records and a self-serve oriented data processing engine; (2) self-serve oriented service composition, which includes the brand new concept and model of the end-user oriented business component, and the design of self-serve oriented service composition engine. The former enables the end users to develop data centric business applications, and the latter enables the end users to integrate the services provided by partners or third parties into their applications, all done in a self-serve fashion. The end users mentioned here are tech-savvy, but non-programmers, the business people.To check the feasibility of this approach, we developed a prototype system named Appdiy platform. The experiment we taken with the SMB end users shows that a customer centric self-serve oriented approach can definitely reduce risk, cost, time to market, and improve the flexibility of the expected business solutions.