The category
Adaptive Software On Demand
Adaptive Software On Demand is business software built around one company's way of working, delivered at the speed of a subscription product, and owned outright by the company that commissioned it. It is a delivery model, not a product you sign up for.
The name describes what changed. Software used to be either adaptive or on demand and never both: you could have something shaped around your business if you were willing to wait a year and fund a project, or you could have something available this week if you were willing to work the way it expected. Ferrite delivers both at once, and the customer keeps what is delivered.
Why the two used to be mutually exclusive.
Building software around a single company was expensive because almost all of it was built from nothing each time. The parts nobody sees — accounts and permissions, audit trails, deployment, the connections out to the systems a business already runs — had to be built again for every project, and they are most of the work. That cost is what made custom software a year-long programme, and it is why subscription products won: one product built once for thousands of customers spreads that cost across all of them.
The trade you accepted in return is the one everybody knows. A product built for thousands of companies fits each of them approximately. The parts that do not fit become your team's workarounds, and you pay for every person who touches it, every year, without ever owning it.
Adaptive Software On Demand removes the reason for the trade rather than arguing about it. The foundation is already built and already governed, so what gets made for you is the part that is actually specific to you — your process, your rules, your exceptions. That is a fraction of the work, which is why it arrives in a timeframe comparable to procuring and rolling out a subscription product instead of a year later.
What makes a delivery model Adaptive Software On Demand?
Four things have to be true at once. Drop any one of them and it is something else.
- Adaptive: the application is shaped around how one organisation actually works, not around the average of a market.
- On demand: it arrives in the time a company would otherwise spend contracting, configuring and rolling out a subscription product.
- Owned: the customer owns the application it commissioned, and holds a licence to the platform it runs on.
- Supported: somebody is responsible for keeping it running, without that responsibility being the thing that holds the software hostage.
The fourth is the one most often missing. Traditional custom software satisfies the first and third and then leaves you maintaining it yourself; a subscription satisfies the second and fourth and never the third.
What 'owned' means here, precisely.
The customer owns the application built for it, and controls the infrastructure it runs on, the credentials, and the business data inside it. It runs in the customer's own cloud. Ferrite owns the platform underneath and licenses it for as long as the customer operates at least one Ferrite application; the platform's source is not provided or viewable.
The practical test of ownership is what happens when you stop paying. With a subscription, access ends. With Adaptive Software On Demand, ending the optional support service ends the support and nothing else: the application keeps running, the licence stands, and the data stays where it already is. That is the difference between owning something and renting it, and it is the only definition of ownership worth the word.
Priced by what the software contains, not by who logs in.
An application is quoted once, against what it is made of: the screens people work in, the workflows it runs, the kinds of record it keeps, and the outside systems it connects to. Hiring more people does not change the price, because there are no seats to buy.
After that there are two optional, separable costs: the infrastructure it runs on, billed at what it costs, and Ferrite Care, the ongoing service that keeps a delivered application current. Both are optional in the real sense — declining either leaves you with software that still runs and that you still own.