Integrated settlement / closing software for Title companies.
The market leaders right now are God awful. Market leaders include Adeptive (Resware software), ISGN (Gators software), and Ramquest (Closing Market software).
Their platforms usually include a desktop app (not really necessary), in most corporations accessed via Citrix, or installed locally (host of issues with versioning), and an accompanying database and web application. The web app usually offers a very limited view into orders, and some limited ability to place orders and is customer facing. The desktop app is usually internal to the title company.
The amount of money spent supporting these applications is staggering. In one company I know, it's ~$3mil a year in application support alone. That cost alone would make a strong case for switching to something more intuitive. The worst part, however, is that they're also extremely glitchy. When someone misses a closing because of this software, it's a huge deal. That's somebody in a hotel somewhere, and a very unhappy bank.
Some of them suffer from insanely limited UI's, application design that is prone to database blocks, and various bugs such as accounting data updates not being wrapped in transactions and failing to update 2 tables when needed (so you get 'half' of a payment and your ledgers are out of sync).
In practice, here's all these boil down to: It's a task list (provides user with a list of tasks to complete) that has some attached functionality to help you do the task, and is customizable. The reason most are desktop apps is because the most used functionality is document preparation, which seems to be universally done in Microsoft word using templates by all these companies. They're also horribly dated.
If this could be a web app, work well, and port data over from the current market leaders into your schema, you would not have to work hard to convince title companies to switch.
The market leaders right now are God awful. Market leaders include Adeptive (Resware software), ISGN (Gators software), and Ramquest (Closing Market software).
Their platforms usually include a desktop app (not really necessary), in most corporations accessed via Citrix, or installed locally (host of issues with versioning), and an accompanying database and web application. The web app usually offers a very limited view into orders, and some limited ability to place orders and is customer facing. The desktop app is usually internal to the title company.
The amount of money spent supporting these applications is staggering. In one company I know, it's ~$3mil a year in application support alone. That cost alone would make a strong case for switching to something more intuitive. The worst part, however, is that they're also extremely glitchy. When someone misses a closing because of this software, it's a huge deal. That's somebody in a hotel somewhere, and a very unhappy bank.
Some of them suffer from insanely limited UI's, application design that is prone to database blocks, and various bugs such as accounting data updates not being wrapped in transactions and failing to update 2 tables when needed (so you get 'half' of a payment and your ledgers are out of sync).
In practice, here's all these boil down to: It's a task list (provides user with a list of tasks to complete) that has some attached functionality to help you do the task, and is customizable. The reason most are desktop apps is because the most used functionality is document preparation, which seems to be universally done in Microsoft word using templates by all these companies. They're also horribly dated.
If this could be a web app, work well, and port data over from the current market leaders into your schema, you would not have to work hard to convince title companies to switch.