Solid-state means ordinary users can configure low-cost extensions to their financial management capabilities that are permanently enabled and unaffected by changes to parent applications running in the cloud, permitting entirely new forms of conducting business without IT in the room. Leading examples of solid-state financial management systems capable of meeting the needs of corporations and governments are Intacct and Workday.
The powerful user-friendliness of solid-state systems represents a consistent trend in computing evolution since the advent of the GUI and mouse driven personal computer in the early 1980's.
That required "taller applications", meaning applications that consumed greater computing resources to mask the complexity of commanding the computer from the user. The complexity masking solid-state financial management systems are products of the same trade-off. Solid-state systems run in the cloud because their application heights require an industrial-strength platform, represented by commercial data centers.
Complexity from the user’s perspective has been driven down into the technology stack and users need only be concerned with configuring self-documenting software primitives for extending financial management capabilities. It is so simple, it is not thought of as programming.
Solid-state systems represent a powerful paradigm shift.
Previous generations of financial management systems were mass-produced and sold on a "buy-it and you own it" paradigm, the same paradigm that has enabled scalable computing since the early 1980’s.
You paid the license fees and you owned the product. The problem, however, with mass-production of financial management systems was that the features you purchased were often not features you needed, and the features you needed were often were not available. Worse, your customizations were often broken by an applications upgrade cycle you had no control over.
Solid-state systems, however, are offered on a mass-customization and usage paradigm. You use what you do not own as a set of services from a services provider. They are the next step in scalable computing. You rent applications for only the features you need and use their powerful customization toolsets to configure them for your particular context, without having to worry that future upgrades to the applications you are renting will break your customizations.
That is a fundamental paradigm shift giving all those that understand a significant opportunity for advantage over their competitors.
