Customizations cost money but they improve business processes, reduce manual work, and eliminate staff process re-training. Off-the-shelf solutions provide lower startup costs and are easier to upgrade, but may require changing procedures, re-training staff, or living with manual processes.

The choice of which way to go, often requires a fortune teller who can predict your future business processes, upcoming mergers, product enhancements, regulatory changes, and future economic conditions. But, a fortune teller with these capabilities is way out of your price range

Free advice: Stay Flexible

Purchase solutions which meet the majority of your current requirements, but are easy to customize should you need to in the future. Select a SaaS vendor that will allow you to move your solution on-premise at some time in the future.

What is “Easy to Customize”?

Software that is “easy-to-customize” must have all the characteristics below.

• Software has well documented APIs that enable you to modify all business logic.
  Murphy’s Rule: if you cannot change some of the logic, then that is precisely the logic you will need to change.
• Software is written in standard languages on common programming platforms.
  Hint: if the solution is written on a platform built by a vendor for the vendor’s application, then its proprietary.
  Hint 2: if you cannot access the platform source code, it’s proprietary
• Software has a software development kit (SDK) that is used to produce applications.
  Hint: if the vendor does not use their own SDK for development, then you should budget a lot of time for debugging the SDK.
• Customizations are managed separately from core logic, so upgrades and updates do not break customizations.
  Note: The road to becoming obsolete starts with getting stuck on an old software release because you cannot port your customizations to the latest release.
• Customizations occur at any time and are not dependent on software releases.
  Note: if you have to wait for the vendor to customize your application or you have to schedule your customizations around releases, then you should make sure that you have a very patient boss.

Systems which fall short in any of these areas are not easy to customize.

Are SaaS platforms “easy to customize”?

As defined above, 0% of multi-tenant SaaS applications are easy to customize. There are some single-tenant SaaS applications which meet the criteria.

Customization may not be critical for your business. Before ruling out SaaS, decide if how much customization you need. Many SaaS providers provide online configuration tools that allow you to change business processes, screen layouts, and data fields to accommodate special needs. Make sure that you understand the limitations. For example, don’t expect to build real-time interfaces to your existing systems and don’t expect to build a memory intensive or computing intensive add-on without angering your SaaS provider and other companies on the platform.

See the next article for a deeper dive into customizing SaaS.