APEX

As some of you may have already noticed, I do like Apex a lot and think this is an excellent tool to produce high quality web applications - fast.

But I am getting a bit frustrated about the market opportunities for Application Express, especially when I think about myself as a consultant.

I get the impression that is is quite difficult to be hired as a consultant for Apex. It is mainly used for small internal systems, many of them for administrative purposes. It is for free (or at least included in the Oracle license). Mainly internal staff is working on it, there aren't that many (visible) projects out there.

When it comes to developing web applications, it is either J2EE or .Net, especially with larger customers. And a bit of PHP/Python. Period.

What do you think customers would be willing to pay good money for? Apex is for free, why spend lots of money for external consultants/developers?

I was working previously with Oracle Internet Application Server, focusing on Oracle Portal. It has sooo many bugs and shortcomings. Migrations to the newest release are really a pain. But since the customer spent a lot of money on the product, they are willing to spend a lot of money for people to make it work. This is crazy but this is the way it is.

My bottom line so far is to (1) bid for fixed priced projects and (2) build applications based on Apex / Oracle XE for sale.

What is your opinion?

What services, prebuilt applications, perhaps themes could be of value that somebody would be willing to pay money for it?

Thanks,
~Dietmar.