In a LinkedIn post, THE REVELATOR asks “Why is the build versus buy debate a moot exercise?”.

The answer to this question is super simple.

If you are NOT a software^* company, it is NEVER build. NEVER, EVER. Especially since “Build” typically means outsourcing to a Big X who are typically specialist implementors, not builders, and will just have to outsource to a Dev Shop and add a high margin to manage that outsourced project for you IF they want to get it right. (Just Google “Accenture Hertz Lawsuit” to see what happens when they get it wrong, so the smart Big X really do add a layer between you and an outsource Dev Shop in South America, Eastern Europe, or India … and trust us when we say that the last option ain’t always great either!) In the end, the project will cost 5X to 10X, take significantly longer than you expect, and rarely deliver entirely what you want.

The debate today should be “assemble vs. buy”, because the most you should do is determine whether its best to go with one provider who provides some functionality across the board for a function, but maybe not as deep as you want in certain areas, or if you want to assemble a slew of best of breed modules that go deep everywhere you want deep. In the latter case, you are deciding whether you are going to select a slew of best of breed modules from a slew of vendors and oversee the integration yourself (one time cost plus incremental costs on the update of each component solution) or go with an “orchestration” solution (and its year over year SaaS fee) vs. just selecting one of the same old Big Suite providers that will handle everything (with a fee to match).

The only thing that remains correct about the “build” vs buy debate is that you need to maintain the “build” mentality, in that you may have to lego-block “build” from a collection of best-of-breed modular solutions. However, the “build” will never be a build from scratch, just a build from components, the same way we used to assemble our own desktop systems.

^* and even if you are a software company, if the type of software needed is not the type of software you build, and there is a reasonable SaaS solution, you should go with that;