According to recent statistics from Forrester, companies spend about 27 percent of their software dollars on application servers, IDEs, design and modeling tools, testing tools, and other tools that allow their in-house developers to create custom applications or to customize off-the-shelf applications.
Which apps are most likely to be customized? Industry-specific apps top the list, followed by information and knowledge management, CRM, finance and accounting, order management, and ERP applications.
InfoWorld argues that these statistics show the need for applications which are easily extensible. “Open and extensible APIs have a significant role to play in allowing developers to take a piece of software, open source or not, and use it as the basis for an application that their business or customer requires.”
