Software buying

The most cost-effective solution for a software project is to buy a good product that meets your needs off the shelf. Unfortunately this is not always possible. Vendor products are often too generic and require significant customization to be useful to your organization. Outsourcing is another way of buying software solutions, and they will be discussed in this chapter. 

Test software. Take the proven route. Software sales cycles are long and complex. To shorten them, software sales personnel sell the promise and the hope of the project to top executives, short-circuiting the sales processes. As a result, 60 percent of these projects were sold to executive teams without proper testing by their supporting IT departments. As a result, many of the technology failures were due to project commitments made by unknowing leaders to buy software that was just not ready. 

If you are not buying software from the manufacturer of your hardware, can the software handle your spectrum files easily ... 

When buying software, find out as much about it beforehand as possible. Ask for test spectra to be analysed. Ask for a hands-on demonstration - yours, not... 

OggVorbis (. ogg) is another relatively new compressed media file format that is appropriate for audio delivered over the Internet. It is an open-standard audio format that can be freely used by anyone. Most other codecs, notably. mp3, require some type of payment for their use (in most cases, you automatically pay when you buy software like ACID). OggVorbis yields high compression ratios, maintains good quality, and supports streaming. This is an excellent format, but, at the time of this writing, it is not as widely distributed as the. mp3 or. wma formats. 

Over the last thirty years, international collaboration and cooperation on a scale rarely witnessed in science has led to the development of several very sophisticated software packages for ab initio molecular electronic structure calculations. In the early days, such packages were freely distributed amongst workers in the field. Today, you buy executable code, a licence and professional documentation just as with any software package. 

A difficult balance to maintain is the tightrope between custom and general operation. For minimum development and maintenance, the software should be very generalized. However, from the user s perspective it must be fast and easy to use. These two poles often conflict. If the in-house software is too general, one may as well buy a general commercial package. Too specific and it loses cost effectiveness. The end product must be generalized yet customizable to the requirements of the application. 

You seldom have much choice about this software. When you buy a spectrometer you will get some software from the manufacturer. The big manufacturers are Bruker, Varian and JEOL. Their software is called Topspin, VNMRJ and Delta respectively. These pieces of software are quite complex as they have to perform all the spectrometer control as well as processing and some simulation. That said, all manufacturers have improved their software to make it more user-friendly in recent times and it is not the challenging beast that it used to be. 

In a similar vein, users who otherwise might not be able to afford large, complex software packages (costing thousands of dollars, perhaps) may be able to buy time on commercial servers, thereby gaining access to powerful tools while saving precious research and development funds for other uses. 

Computers costing in the range of 10,000 to 20,000 can execute most of the widely available modeling software packages. This is quite inexpensive compared to the cost of developing major software, or even of continuously converting new releases of progrsims written for another computer. Therefore, it may be quite reasonable to buy a... 

Low-priced, infopenic drugs are akin to simple software that one can buy at prices approaching the cost of a blank floppy disk. No one in the software marketplace confuses program with disk , but medicine and chemical are often confused in the pharmaceuticals marketplace. This reflects the failure of pharmaceutical scientists and marketeers alike to communicate the value of the corpus of information that transforms a formulated chemical into a valuable medicine. We must do better. 

The term place refers to where the business will be located, or more generally, what channels will be employed to get the product or service to customers. Companies selling software to the financial sector will do well to locate in New York, London, and other major financial capitals to be close to companies in then-market. Companies that depend on recruiting specialized scientific and engineering talent will do well to locate near universities with excellent reputations in the needed talents. Of course, the virtual world of the Web has reduced somewhat the competitive advantage of physical presence or place. The Web permits customers almost anywhere to communicate, buy, and be serviced after the sale by companies that use e-mail, Web browsers, and other tools of online communication. 

One of the first choices is whether to buy a turnkey minicomputer system for GLC, a "kit" that provides 90% of the software needed for acquiring and processing data from chromatograms, or whether to start from scratch in assembling your own hardware/ software system (3). This is a key decision and must be made very early in the evaluation. 

Every software project has to answer this tough and sometimes very political question Should we buy or build I do not intend to give readers definitive answers. But I will share some advice based on my experience. 

Like buying computer software, the first step is to decide exactly what you will be using the HPLC for today and possibly in the future. I m not talking about specific separations at this point those decisions will be used to control column selection, which we will discuss in a moment. What I m really looking for is an overall philosophy of use. 

A word of warning if you are planning to do automated methods development. The HPLC system you buy will generally dictate the type of methods development software that is available to you this is not an add-on procedure that you can purchase at a later time, except from the manufacturer of your system computer. If you are contemplating a need for this technique, I would recommend strongly that you talk to other people who are already successfully doing this type of work and find out their HPLC system source and buy from the same place. 

This is not to say that general packages on the market are deficient or even not worth buying, on the contrary, they are mainly very useful and much more user friendly than the majority of home made programs. What we want to say is that for special applications the general purpose software may not offer the very best data handling procedure available. And at this point the programming know-how becomes very valuable. 

Don t purchase a piece of hardware and then try to find, or not finding develop, applications software. The better approach is to find the software that will do the job, and then buy the hardware best suited for it. 

One problem with documents kept in any system is that other people given the document will need the same application to view the document. Sending a file in Microsoft Word format requires that the recipient also own a copy of Microsoft Word. Without it, the document cannot be viewed. This problem has been solved by a new standard known as Acrobat from Adobe systems. By using Acrobat, anyone wishing to publish a document uses the Acrobat software to create a version readable by the Acrobat Reader. The reader software is freely distributed, so the recipient of a document need not buy a copy of the original software. Besides being able to create documents viewable by anyone, this new standard also allows the document to be indexed. Any part of the document can also be cross-referenced to other sections. These features are especially useful in documentation, particularly in NDA submissions. Volumes of paper documents can now be stored on a single disk and instantly cross-referenced. A reviewer could have an entire NDA available on the computer screen. 

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