Business application

That general description comes from the Kompass der föderalen IT-Architektur ('compass of the federal IT architecture'), published by FITKO, the federal IT co-operation of the German public sector. The page uses the German term 'Fachapplikation' and is marked as a draft. The German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), in its IT-Grundschutz-Kompendium, counts individually customised business applications, such as personnel administration software, as bespoke software. We found no definition of the term in law or in any standard.

We use the term more narrowly, for software that covers processes off-the-shelf products do not fit. Examples include customer portals, B2B B2B B2B, short for business-to-business, is the market in which companies sell goods and services to other companies. Read in the glossary → ordering portals and automated workflows. Projects often start with a remark such as 'Our SAP SAP SAP is a software company whose business software includes enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems; an SAP landscape is the set of SAP systems a company runs. can't do that.' These applications run alongside the standard systems, whether SAP or another ERP system ERP ERP (enterprise resource planning) is cross-departmental business software that manages and analyses processes such as production, sales, logistics, finance and human resources. Read in the glossary → , a WMS WMS WMS stands for warehouse management system; according to the short description of VDI 3601, its task is to manage and optimise a company's internal storage and transport systems. Read in the glossary → or an e-commerce platform. Instead of replacing those systems, they connect to them through APIs API An API (application programming interface) is a defined set of functions and rules that lets one piece of software use the features or data of another system or service. Read in the glossary → and secure file transfer (SFTP SFTP SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) transfers files securely over a Secure Shell (SSH) connection; despite the name, it is a separate protocol from the older FTP. Read in the glossary → ).

The ordering microsites we build for pharma manufacturers are one example (see Microsite). Our first business application for a pharma logistics provider went live in 2016. We run these applications ourselves and keep developing them.