Software Selection > Programming Language Evaluation

Any software selection process should include a review of the application layer; programming language, that drives the software and the financial strength of its vendor. An application layer supported by a profitable and growing company will facilitate future improvements to the software.

At Kensai we rank the application layer on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest rank.

Example 1.

One publishing software vendor uses Unify Corporation’s Vision product as its application layer.

A visit to the application vendor’s website; http://www.unify.com/, (on Feb 25, 20007) revealed the following;

• For fiscal year 2006 ending April 30, 2006 Unify reported total revenue of $11.2 million, compared to $11.3 million in the prior fiscal year. Net loss for the year was $682K compared to $2.4M in the prior year.
• For the first six months of fiscal year 2007 ending October 31st, total revenues were $3.9 million, a decrease of $0.9 million, or 19 percent from fiscal 2006 six-month revenues of $4.8 million. Year to date net loss from all operations was $941,000 or $0.03 loss per share, compared to a net loss of $107,000 or $0.00 loss per share in the comparable period last year.
• The Vision product does not appear to be the primary focus of their R&D efforts.
• They have offices in the UK, US and Paris.
• They have 60 employees.

Based on the above information we would assign a rank of 1 or 2 to the application layer. Why? The vendor's sales are declining, the company is losing money, the application - Vision - is not the primary product of the vendor and they have only 60 employees.

Example 2.

Another vendor uses Microsoft .NET VB as their programming language.

Based on this information we would assign a rank of 5 to the application layer. Why? Microsoft is the world's largest software company, the .NET initiative is a major focus of Microsoft, and there are tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of programmers and businesses that use this programming language.