In the land of ERP, “custom” is probably the dirtiest word out there. If you use the word “custom” at your weekly IT meeting, everyone’s faces will grimace. Custom is bad because it suggests the pain of ownership.
Custom Implementation has been incredibily costly, until now
The popularity of on-premise ERP apps in the 90s stemmed from offering extensive customization options (e.g., PeopleTools, PL-SQL, ABAP). While this allowed users to tailor the "off-the-shelf" software to their specific business needs, it created a severe downside: a unique, custom implementation that became incredibly costly to maintain and upgrade, especially alongside vendor updates. This complexity ultimately proved to be the compelling reason for the shift to the "Cloud."
Cloud did not solve the expensive customisation problem
The “Cloud” arrived in a fanfare of “single code line” and “death to customisation”. Everyone was the same! Except they weren’t: Cloud ERP brought with it a whole new tool bag of “configurations” that have proven every bit as complex and expensive to manage as “custom” extensions. True, Cloud ERP did solve the “upgrade” problem: you couldn’t get abandoned on PeopleSoft 7.1 - but it didn’t solve the customisation problem properly. It’s still too damn expensive!
No two businesses are the same. Embrace customisation!
Every single customer who buys any sort of ERP package needs to customise it. This is just the plain fact of life. No two businesses are the same. So rather than pretending otherwise, we need to lean in and embrace "custom" — not as a dirty word, but as a design principle. The real problem was never customisation itself, it was the cost of owning it.
Build your software specifically for your business
At VCola, we've built a machine that generates enterprise applications from a precise specification of exactly what you need. AI is driving the cost to build software down towards zero, and we've positioned everything around that reality. The result is a fundamentally different economic equation: instead of spending years and millions renting a platform that was never built for your business, you can now own the exact thing you need - built quickly, maintained cheaply and yours to keep. Custom isn't the enemy. Expensive custom is. We've fixed the expensive part. Don’t rent software that wasn’t built for you!
