Challenges In Developing Leasing Software

A variety of software solutions exist to automate lease pricing and management processes. Since this industry is highly regulated, leasing software is subject to frequent upgrades and changes. Additionally, there is a huge need for a software product to be flexible enough to accommodate the requirements and processes of multiple lessors.

Some of the major challenges in distributed software development for the leasing industry are discussed below.  

Software Customization  
The leasing industry today is saturated with software vendors who provide a single line of leasing products to all of their customers. Although in some cases software vendors are creating specialized versions of products for individual customers, this customization can itself become a problem when vendors are forced to maintain multiple software releases and variations for each of their customers. If they choose not to maintain these customized software versions, then their customers are “stuck” with that version and cannot take advantage of any ongoing upgrades that are made to the general product.  

Ever Changing Business Requirements  
Customers must have a software product that is flexible enough to handle the changing requirements of the market, as well as the growing competition within the overall business environment. One such need is that of internationalization and localization. With the concept of a global enterprise quickly becoming commonplace, there is an enhanced need to internationalize software products. A world‐ready product offers many benefits, including increased revenue, reduced international development costs and lower support costs.  

Integration with Other Software or Products  
A leasing product almost always needs to integrate with enterprise backend and pricing applications. These integration requirements demand a software product that has been build accordingly from the ground up.

Proposed Solutions
Only a few years ago, lessors faced the choice of building a custom solution or purchasing an “off‐the‐shelf” system, possibly with a few modifications. Custom solutions were more expensive and riskier but had the potential to produce a solution that more exactly matched the company’s operational requirements. “Off‐the‐shelf” solutions were more affordable and proven but required the lessor to accept the limits of the system or pay the vendor to modify the software.  

This decision is no longer black or white. Innovative software providers are now creating a “middle ground” by developing systems that use components and flexible configurations. Although these systems are not 100% user‐definable, they are much more flexible than traditional systems and are available at a fraction of the cost of a fully customized solution.

Configurable systems accomplish this flexibility by writing callable components and by using definable screens, report writers and a workflow language to link everything together. Below we discuss how software vendors are delivering customized, adaptable products faster and more cost‐effectively.  

Software Product Customization  
While the core system remains the same for every customer, the data capture, user interface requirements and processes are manipulated from customer to customer without running into version control issues. Workflow software and Rules Engine are used for customizing the product for different customers. Moreover, a Rules Engine solves the problem of making products flexible enough to handle changes in the customer’s business requirements.  

Software Product Integration  
Lenders and lessors need a solution that provides end‐to‐end integration for dealer portal, proposal management, business account management, credit management, automatic decision making, contract administration, data acquisition and management, payments collection and several automated functions Software control over processes enables the re‐design of these processes in line with changing business needs. Business processes can be automated in whole or in part using a workflow software and Rules Engine. These tools set procedural rules to pass documents, information or tasks from one resource (human or machine) to another for an action. Moreover, a leasing product that uses XML at its core and performs most functions through web services can be integrated easily with legacy systems in a structured manner. This type of leasing product blends sea

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Trends in Extract Transform Load

The processes that enables companies to move data from multiple and disparate sources, reformat and cleanse it, and then load it into either another database, a data mart / data warehouse for analysis, or another operational system to support a business process. This process involves:

Extracting data from outside sources or source operational / archive systems that are the primary source of data for the data warehouse

Transforming the data to fit business needs, which may involve data migration, data cleaning, filtering, validating, reformatting, standardization, aggregation or applying business rules

Loading the data into the end target (i.e., a data warehouse or any other database or application that houses data)

Trends in ETL

Evolving towards generic data integration tools: Not withstanding the fact that ETL tools are specifically aimed at the business intelligence market, they have evolved rapidly over the last few years. According to Gartner, “The stand-alone data integration technology markets — such as extraction, transformation and loading (ETL), replication and federation, and enterprise information integration — will rapidly implode into a single market for multi-mode, multipurpose data integration platforms.” Indeed, if one looks at the top vendors in the market, it is clear that this is happening or has happened already. Informatics has added a real-time module to its distributed software development allowing Informatics to brand Power Center as an EAI tool. IBM has added Data Stage, acquired from Ascential, under the WebSphere family. Oracle has also greatly improved its Warehouse Builder in the 11g version.

Data quality: Another obvious trend in ETL (and data integration in general) is the linkage with data quality tools (both cleansing and profiling). The awareness of the impact of bad quality data on both decision making and operations has risen enormously during the last years. Therefore, most ETL vendors have incorporated data profiling functionality into their tools (thus allowing developers to assess data quality before they develop data transformations), as well as integration with Medical device software development (thus allowing developers to build complex cleansing and standardization features in the transformation process). The above becomes clear when one analyzes the investments or acquisitions that ETL vendors have made over the last years.

Lower latency requirement: In the early stages of their data integration maturity and infrastructure, organizations tend to focus on batch-oriented, high-latency activities, such as nightly population of data warehouses and data extracts for interfacing between developing mobile applications. However, as business pressures require rapid response and reduced cycle times, the demand for lower-latency data integration builds. Although ETL vendors are having a hard time offering true real-time, many offer near real-time functionality.

Market consolidation: Also important to mark is that independent ETL vendors are disappearing. Informatica Power-Center still remains as an independent market leader, but other companies are offering ETL tools as part of a wider gamma of BI tools or as part of the database offering. Indeed, Microsoft, Oracle and IBM all have an ETL offering, with the first two vendors even offering the ETL engine ‘free of charge’ with the database.

Phase out home-built, phase in open source: Quite a few companies have invested during the 80s and the 90s in self-built ETL tools. Mostly these were simple, sometimes metadata-based SQL generators that executed scheduled SQL scripts against the database. In recent years, these tools have been disappearing, first making way for the commercial ETL tools and more recently for the open source ETL market, which has seen quite a few successes with Pentaho Data Integration (previously kettle), Talend and others.

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