Copy pasted below...
When a company uses a consulting firm to build an application, it is beneficial to have the firm take responsibility for the entire project. If you don't do this, it will be impossible to assign blame when things fall apart.
The other aspect of this is that the team needs to work closely together, else miscommunication and other mayhem ensue.
So this forces the consulting firm to staff up with ALL the various competencies that are needed to complete a project - and for the organization to use this one-stop shop.
But when you use a platform like Force.com, this becomes less important. The architecture of the application is already in place, all the hard things like security and authentication are taken care of, there is no database tuning needed, there is much closer communication with the users, etc. The development cycles are much shorter and the overall number of people involved is significanly less, so the need for project management and system documentation doesn't have the same level of criticality.
This means that it is relatively easy to slot different people in at different times from different companies - because they are all working in the same playground they know well. It's not a problem to carve out a snippet of APEX code to be developed by someone who is not heavily involved in the project, or for someone to build a VisualForce screen. It just plugs right in (or should).
Besides, because many of the applications that will be built on a platform like Force will be ever-evolving, it will be much harder to keep a complete team in place at all times. (This is beyond "maintenance" - there is no such thing as maintenance for situational applications - just ever-evolving software).
This means that we are going to see the rise of boutique firms that specialize in different aspects of Force development - application/business process design, APEX/VF programming, and cloud node integration. The old one-stop shop will become increasingly less necessary for building many types of applications, and companies will simply be able to call in specialists as needed from whatever firm has the resources available at the time.
Or not?
