Friday, April 23, 2010

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times!

Lately I have been working on ERP and CRM applications on cloud computing platform. At GST we already have developed an ERP system on Microsoft technologies. So far we have been selling the application as a product but looking at the current direction the market is taking, we decided to club it with a CRM and provide it as a hosted solution kinda like what NetSuite has been doing so far. So you can subscribe to either the ERP suite as a whole along with the CRM but also can opt to subscribe to only the modules that you want as standalones.

It seems you can sell anything these days as long as it is user friendly. Just the other day I was looking at an online accounting application. The UI was quite user friendly and with quite a cool dashboard with drag/drop frames like iGoogle. But talking in terms of functionality, the system was quite basic and lacked advanced functionalities like Contracts Ledger and credit card reconciliation. But they still do reasonable good business.

This kept me thinking...are users ready to compromise on functionality for a good user experience???