In business today, the ability to embrace flexible technology adoption has become a critical factor for success. Yet only 48% of digitization initiatives meet or exceed their intended outcomes. Clearly, there’s a very big gap between expectations and reality for transformation projects.
One of the most pivotal decisions facing businesses is whether to build a custom solution in-house or buy a pre-existing one. This choice can carry profound implications for an organization’s agility, scalability and long-term success. Making the right decision is not just important — it’s essential.
Shattering the Custom Development Myth
As organizations continue to prioritize digitalization, global investment in IT transformation initiatives is projected to exceed $4 trillion by 2027.
The long-standing argument for in-house development has been customization — the belief that only tailor-made solutions can address your unique business challenges. This is no longer the case.
Today’s market-leading platforms offer unprecedented flexibility. Modern solutions provide robust frameworks with extensive customization options, supporting multiple currencies, languages, vendor integrations, and AI-powered analytics out of the box. Building this level of sophistication internally requires not just significant resources, but expertise that most IT departments simply don’t possess.
According to McKinsey, seven out of 10 business transformations fail. Ultimately, the outdated view that off-the-shelf solutions lack customization can cost companies millions.
The Real Cost: Time, Money, and Missed Opportunities
Time has always been the primary advantage of using a pre-built solution. It can take on average 12 to 18 months to scope, build, and implement a custom solution, compared to a matter of weeks to deploy a pre-existing solution.
Cost is another advantage. After all, time is money. Developing a custom solution requires significant up-front investment and the final cost can be unpredictable. Meanwhile, most tech solutions today are charged on a subscription basis with a lower up-front cost and predictable subscription fees.
The most significant cost when building something custom is opportunity. While you are building, your competitors are innovating and capturing market share. Deploying an existing solution allows you to innovate at speed and realize return on investment (ROI) faster.
When buying a pre-existing solution, new functionality, updates and innovations are managed by the provider, often deployed automatically, requiring very little IT team involvement. For a bespoke solution, all maintenance, updates and product updates require ongoing investment and time from the IT team.
With vastly different timelines for implementation and maintenance, a platform approach becomes more cost effective.
Keeping Up with Innovation
Traditionally, flexibility isn’t about customization — it’s about adaptation. With the rapid rate that technology is advancing, it’s becoming a significant advantage to deploy a pre-existing solution.
Imagine a unified platform approach that connects you instantly with hundreds of pre-integrated vendors across diverse service categories. As technology evolves, these platforms evolve with it.
Consider the cloud strategy evolution: Organizations can switch from a hybrid cloud to multicloud strategy with minimal friction, while custom built solutions can remain anchored to outdated architectures. Similarly, artificial intelligence (AI) is another example – with the technology evolving rapidly, those buying a pre-existing solution have the flexibility to adapt as AI best practices change, where an in-house solution may be locked into an older tech stack.
When Building Makes Sense
There is no one size fits all approach to business. And just because something is hard doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. If that were the case, many of the most innovative companies we all rely on wouldn’t exist.
As a general rule, if your requirements or offering is completely new to the market, or you’re trying to develop a proof of concept, building in-house is a good option. But if your objective is to scale, buying a pre-existing solution becomes very attractive.
The most important step is research. Conduct a thorough audit of the solutions available, their customization frameworks and vendor integrations. If after all that research, the right solution isn’t available, building in-house may be the best way to go.
Skip the Hassle
Buying cloud solutions rather than building them in-house is the smart move for organizations seeking agility, cost efficiency, security, and scalability. Rather than diverting resources to developing and maintaining custom infrastructure, businesses can leverage best-in-class cloud services to accelerate time-to-market, reduce operational complexity, and stay ahead of the competition. At the end of the day, this can be the most important consideration.
The Bottom Line
When buying technology provides flexibility, speed to market, and quicker ROI, the strategic choice is clear — invest in what truly differentiates your business, and partner with experts for everything else. Your competitors are already.
