Lowe’s slogan is “do it right for less.” While that primarily applies to home repair and improvement, the company is also applying it to the world of software development.
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Lowe’s is looking to retool its e-commerce solutions. The goal is to have 80% of the applications it uses be built internally by 2020. This will involve looking at their application portfolio and replacing commercial, off-the-shelf applications with custom replacements. This will involve hiring as many as 2,000 software engineers, data analysts and infrastructure specialists.
As Mark Driver, research vice president at Gartner, Inc. told the WSJ, “we’re in an age where people have their clothes custom fit. The same thing goes with software; it’s about gaining that advantage.”
This is just the latest move on the part of the home-improvement giant to modernize its IT infrastructure. Shortly after being hired as CIO, Seemantini Godbole told analysts and investors the retailer’s technology was “well behind leading retailers in terms of strategy, architecture, process maturity and capabilities.” Ms. Godbole helped unveiled a plan to invest $500 to $550 million per year through 2021, in an effort to modernize the retailer’s decade-old e-commerce system.
The announcement by Lowe’s is just the latest in a solid growth trend for the custom software development market, as companies increasingly turn to custom solutions to achieve tighter integration, better performance and lower cost.