Custom Built for a Competitive Edge

by Joris KuipersJanuary 10, 2024

In my previous blog I wrote about the Technology Advisory services that Trifork provides. In this follow-up I’ll cover the main pillar our services: Custom Application Development.

Application Development

Building custom applications and enterprise solutions is at the heart of what we do in Trifork Amsterdam.

One thing that sets Trifork apart from many other companies with expertise in our stack is that we don’t simply hire out developers and make customers responsible for the rest: we actually take ownership of the projects that we do. This ensures that you end up with working, reliable software: both at the time of the initial delivery as well as in the future.

Our Approach

As we are not focused on any specific business domain, Trifork has a wide variety of customers. We tend to work in different ways with them: sometimes Trifork delivers the core development team and a customer provides the roles of business analyst, tester, project manager, etc.: for other customers Trifork might be a full-service provider that manages all these different aspects.

The same is true for running the software that we develop: some customers run and manage their own operations, for other customers Trifork provides this service (either on-promise or using public cloud).

Having so many different customers provides us with a very broad view of both businesses as well as technologies and runtimes. This means that clients can benefit from insights that we gain from a wide variety of sources and situations, something that we believe is very important as developing custom enterprise solutions means that we’re working in mission-critical parts of the business.

Every improvement there can provide clients with a competitive edge, and having experience in different domains can really help to come up with outside-the-box solutions.

Agile All the Way

We are convinced that the only way to build the right solutions is to work in an agile, incremental way. The details of our process vary from project to project, but short, incremental cycles are a critical part of every one of them. This ensures that requirements are broken down into manageable pieces and that value is delivered throughout the entire delivery phase.

This requires a close collaboration with our customers. Ideally this results in a way of working that’s more like a partnership than a traditional customer-vendor relationship, as trust has been earned and clients learn how to gain the most from custom application development.

We often receive the feedback of how happy people are with the short time it takes to go from idea to an implementation running in production, without compromising stability and security: esp. compared to how product-based vendors deal with change requests. This way software can move at the speed of business, rather than holding it back.

No Vendor Lock-in

Although we believe that we are the absolute experts in the technologies that we use, these technologies themselves are widely known and applied and always based on open-source. That means that when clients continue to work with us for a long period of time, they do that because they’re happy with the service we deliver and not because they’re locked in to the solution that we’ve provided.

We have many projects that end up being so successful over time that clients set up their own development teams to which we transfer the continuing development of the software, and this handover is a model that we actively support if so desired.

New, Rebuilt or Layered Construction

Although projects often deliver new applications from scratch, a substantial amount of work that we do involves rebuilds of systems or components that need to be replaced with modern, maintainable solutions.

Integration and exposing systems (either internally or to external clients) via APIs through layered construction is another area of expertise.

If this peaked your interest, then make sure to check out our website and don’t hesitate to contact us.