Even as many companies continue to buy software applications off the shelf rather than developing them in-house, custom-built applications are still very much part of the IT landscape, according to a report by McKinsey & Co., a consulting firm. The advantages of buying packaged applications, from Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and other vendors, are compelling, as are using applications that vendors create, host and make available over the Internet, like SalesForce.com.

But many companies still spend well over half their applications budgets on custom software, the McKinsey report says, because it helps to enhance, support, and operate customised systems. "Even when a company uses off-the-shelf applications, it frequently customises them, typically by adding modules that provide a distinctive capability. A high-tech company, for example, installed a suite of packaged enterprise-resource-planning applications but also built a customised cash-management application to supplement the ERP product’s plain-vanilla finance functionality. Unfortunately, even a little customisation here and there quickly adds up," the report by Sam Marwaha, Samir Patil, and Ranjit Tinaikar says.

When customising, companies must revise systems to meet new business needs. This can be difficult and costly, and upgrades to customised applications usually cost more than those to packaged software. In such a fluid situation, the three McKinsey consultants say, some companies have found a way to capture the benefits of packaged software in a customised-applications environment. "They have adopted the approach of software vendors, which package and sell applications aimed at the common needs of many customers rather than of individuals, by writing an application once and then selling it many times. In this way, pioneering banks and media and pharmaceutical companies have reduced the complexity and cost of managing applications and speeded up the deployment of new or updated ones," the report says. A company can define the management of common elements among applications as standardised "products" designed to provide for the needs of many applications rather than one. Similarly, it can assemble new, custom-built applications from common, internally built modules of functionality and then reuse services developed by its teams to undertake common tasks such as authenticating users or accessing attributes of customers or products. "Like software vendors, such a company writes the code once but uses it frequently — a tactic made possible by creating application interfaces that incorporate broadly accepted standards such as those from the Web Services Interoperability Organisation," the report says.

Tally Solutions, a Bangalore-based software products firm, has taken a new initiative in its growing education business by launching its own global certification programme for business accounting, Mr Bharat Gopalakrishnan, CEO, South Asia business, said on Friday.

Mr Gopalakrishnan told this newspaper that the initiative was to bring in standardisation in the education stream and ensure more and better jobs for Tally certified professionals.

Mr Gopalakrishnan said there were 70,000 educational institutions in India out of which 70 per cent taught Tally. Tally was contacting 400,000 companies for placements in the coming quarter. Tally has 800 academies across the country imparting the training programme. The Tally certification programme has been launched with two tests — the Tally Financial Accounting Certification and the Tally Technologies Certification. He claimed that with 18 lakh users, the requirement for Tally certified professionals had been on the increase. In the next 3 months alone 400 plus placement associates and executives would meet 3.5 lakh employers across the country to place Tally Certified Professionals.

The next time you hear your call centre team leader, or BPO, colleague in the adjacent cubicle say "close window," don’t just think that you’re being asked to get up and close the window, they could actually be talking to their computer.

Some time in late 2006 or early 2007, computer users could possibly be interacting and talking to their computers. Breakthroughs in natural-language processing and artificial intelligence, which offers the greatest potential to interact with computers without any requiring specialised knowledge, has meant that current speech recognition programmes being developed in software labs could allow computers to understand human words and vocabulary like never before, say experts.

According to Mr Mathai Joseph, executive director, Tata Research Development and Design Centre and executive vice-president TCS, "It has long been a goal to get a computer to generate speech that is indistinguishable from human speech, and to recognise human speech. Great progress has been made over the past three decades and the enormous increase in computer speeds has enabled the use of complex techniques."

MIT, US, has already demonstrated a new speech recognition programme called "dragon naturally speaking", that allows users to speak directly to the objects on the screen. A

new product called ‘utter command’, set to launch in later in the year, could encourage those with repetitive strain injuries to make more use of voice recognition software