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Integrating Your Corporate Software: Build vs. Buy

An organization that wishes to integrate disparate computing resources can either build an integration solution in-house or buy a packaged integration software application. While building a custom application may seem the most cost-effective route, this approach is fraught with problems. Bloor Research notes, “There are clear downsides to Custom Code: can you easily integrate data cleansing, is documentation automatically generated, and can you prove the lineage of your data for compliance purposes?” Packaged integration software applications now offer a compelling alternative to the expensive, time-consuming quagmire of in-house development. Learn more, in this comprehensive whitepaper from Pervasive Software.

Merger and acquisition activity. E-commerce initiatives. Application integration. Compliance requirements. Business intelligence. Supply chain management. XML Web services. Access to high volumes of data. All these demands drive the growing need for integration across an organization. Today, highly functional and flexible enterprise integration applications are available as ready-to-go software packages. Yet many organizations are unsure whether they can rely on a “store bought” package, particularly if they’re accustomed to handling complex application development in-house.

Preliminary Considerations and Due Diligence

Whether or not to build an in-house integration solution boils down to an honest assessment of the needs of the organization and what it will take to meet those needs. Sometimes the nature of the project dictates the necessary direction. Does your organization require a solution involving a highly specialized business function for which no commercial software exists? Then you should build that solution in-house. Or do you need to integrate order-entry or another standard SaaS or on-premises application with established applications across the enterprise?

In this case, you should give the option to buy a solution a closer look. Evaluate the following factors in regards to your proposed integration project:

• Availability of in-house resources, including development staff
• Complexity and purpose of the project
• Particular needs of the organization
• Time to deployment

Also, consider these issues:

• Can your project's time-to-market strategy support developing the integration infrastructure
• Is your development staff large and skilled enough in the technology and standards to build an integration engine in-house?
• Are your resources best spent developing homegrown data and application integration software? Is data integration your core competency?

The Challenges with Custom Integration Solutions

The complexity of today’s computing environments only magnifies the difficulties of implementing custom integration applications. Problems inherent in building these solutions from scratch include:

• Too expensive to develop
• Too expensive to maintain
• Too time consuming
• No real process improvements

Too Expensive to Develop: If a check isn’t directly earmarked for your integration project, it may appear to have no real cost. Your in-house programmers’ time is already paid for, after all. In-house development can be much more costly than it appears though—far more so than that seemingly expensive software package. Developers must be trained and code must be carefully tested. Think about the salaries of your development team, the downtime in user departments during all phases of development, and the opportunity cost of not putting developers on other worthy projects that would propel your business forward. The bottom line: Labor costs dominate custom coding projects, which require significant investments.

Too Expensive to Maintain: Maintaining a custom-built integration application and keeping it running on the current platform or a succession of platforms can be an expensive proposition. And what happens when the programmers who developed the original application move on to other projects and other jobs? The maintenance of custom integration applications is complex, time-intensive and fraught with undocumented functions. Unless the integration application is well documented—another complex and expensive proposition—you will end up throwing more money into maintenance than you ever planned.

Too Time Consuming: Traditionally, in-house application integration projects have involved long learning curves and slow deployment schedules. Time consuming custom development requires considerable due diligence to scope and plan the entire integration project. Once again, your developers’ time is better spent—and time is money.

No Real Process Improvements: One danger of in-house development lies in the tendency to fall back on tried-and-true methodologies. Unfortunately, following the old ways of doing things won’t necessarily yield the optimal solutions. Development methodologies are always changing. Unless your programmers are versed in the latest integration best practices, you risk ending up with something that’s less than what you hoped and planned for. Even if your organization’s business processes have evolved over time, they may still not be refined enough to reflect best practices.

The Benefits of Buying an Integration Solution

In most cases, a packaged integration application can overcome the challenges presented by custom-built solutions. Packaged toolsets leverage existing expertise and technology and offer the following compelling reasons to buy:

• Low total cost of ownership (TCO)
• Faster time to market
• Flexible, scalable implementations
• Higher level of integration with third-party technology
• Integrated, cross-functional processes
• Automated, standardized design processes
• Optimization of development resources
• High reliability through proven performance
• Self-documenting

At TBS, our customers realize many benefits by turning to our SaaS integration package, called I.C.E., for Integrated Cloud Exchange. Perhaps the greatest benefit is that I.C.E. is implemented in a flexible, scalable way.

Instead of leaving your organization to its standard old methodologies, the best integration packages provide maximum opportunities for flexibility. Most include customization features for fine-tuning the integrated computing environment as it changes with business needs. Logic and business rule definitions, for example, can be customized to work with native data formats and schemas through user-friendly interfaces. Open architectures accommodate emerging applications, allowing new technologies to plug into the enterprise. Through all this adaptability, the integrated application can remain up to date with best practices.

In-house integration applications are often developed to meet the needs of the moment, without taking into account rising user demands and data volumes. Integration packages, on the other hand, meet growing levels of user requests and transaction loads with real-time, event-driven, scalable solutions. The most cutting-edge packaged integration applications will also maximize flexibility by providing project scalability. Proven, successful project design components can be reused in other departments, and departmental integration projects can be linked across divisions and built up to a global implementation.

Conclusion: Buy Trumps Build

In today’s complex IT landscape and competitive business environment, custom-built integration applications can’t stand up to road-tested packaged software. Quick-hitting, cost-effective packaged solutions meet your organization’s integration demands by leveraging existing applications and technologies while taking the burden off of internal development resources.

Where custom-built solutions present expensive development and maintenance considerations, packaged options counter with proven lower total cost of ownership. Where in-house integration involves long deployment cycles, easy-to-learn and easy-to-use software packages speed time to value. Where custom applications can get mired in old methodologies and lack scalability, available integration software offers the flexibility of customization options and the scalability that meet your organization’s needs—now and into the future.

To craft an enterprise cloud model tailored to your organization's needs, contact TBS or call 703.444.6562.