The IT Dilemma: Buy A Ready-Made Solution, or Build One Yourself?

Making a strategic decision about whether to build your own IT infrastructure or purchase ready-made solutions is complex, and many pros and cons need to be weighed against each other. In this article, we are taking a deep-dive into the “Buy vs. Build” dilemma to provide you with input on what you should consider when deciding whether to purchase a ready-made billing platform or build one of your own.

Legacy infrastructure makes purchasing more difficult for larger companies

For smaller and medium-sized companies, the choice to buy instead of build is usually easy, and purchasing ready-made IT solutions is typically the only way to go. That’s because these types of companies will rarely have the financial or inhouse resources necessary. They need to focus their talent and monetary resources on their core business.

Larger enterprises, on the other hand, typically have large IT organizations and the resources required for developing their own solutions. In larger companies, establishing the boundaries between what is and what isn’t part of the core business also tends to be more difficult. Historically, building one’s own IT infrastructure has often been part of the more overall, long-term strategy.

Initially, these strategies were based on the belief that they would contribute to competitive advantages, such as more quickly being able to develop new functionalities as needed. But over time, these proprietary systems often need to be expanded or rebuilt, making them more massive and cumbersome, which in turn makes it difficult to keep pace with more modern systems and platforms built on newer technologies.

Buying solutions that need to be integrated with these other, more antiquated solutions can mean time-consuming, costly and complex IT projects. Because of this, companies often decide instead to just keep adding on to the existing solutions. On and on it goes, even though these proprietary solutions don’t offer the same level of user-friendliness or functionality as the turnkey solutions available on the market, and despite the fact that these outdated proprietary solutions can, over time, hamper your rate of growth and negatively impact customer experience.

It’s not “all or nothing”

So what’s to be done? Starting from scratch is not an option, it’s time-consuming and expensive. But doing nothing isn’t a good option either. What then can be done to modernize these IT monsters and make them more agile? First off, it’s important to recognize that you don’t need to change everything from the bottom up and all at once. Consider your own development capabilities in relation to the pace at which you need to launch a new solution for your customers.

There are often ready-made solutions that can replace certain parts of your own, existing IT infrastructure in a relatively easy way that will boost your administrative efficiency and simultaneously improve customer experience. These investments usually quickly pay for themselves, with an ROI that is both quick and easy to calculate.

What parts of your business are best suited for such a change? A good starting point is to identify the systems that don’t give you a competitive edge within your own industry. Invoicing and payments is a perfect example. If there are no particular business goals associated with invoicing and payments in your specific industry, this might be one of the areas where you would benefit from purchasing a ready-made solution rather than trying to build one yourself.

Advantages of purchasing a turnkey billing platform

A turnkey billing platform can offer you benefits far beyond the transaction itself. A more user-friendly interface and better payment experience boosts customer loyalty, which reduces the risk of churn. Automating more steps in the process decreases the amount of manual effort needed, which reduces the administrative burden and costs.

Those who are unable or unwilling to wholeheartedly invest in developing their own solutions on the cutting edge of technology will have trouble realizing all of those advantages on their own. It requires specialist expertise, not least since invoicing and payments is an area where many rules and regulations apply. Very few companies have that knowledge and expertise within their own organization.

Developing even the most basic solution requires an enormous amount of resources. But it doesn’t stop there – you need to maintain the solution it and keep it all updated at the rate that the rules, regulations and your customers’ requirements change. You will need a lot of resources for that, not just today, but every day going forward as long as you continue to rely on a solution that you built yourself.

Avoid time-consuming, complex implementation processes

With the benefit of hindsight, the advantages of an external billing platform are obvious. It’s understandable though, that you might still be concerned about how to integrate ready-made solutions with your existing IT architecture and the resources, cost and time such implementation might require.

The fact is that not all IT projects are huge, expensive and time-consuming. Billogram offers seamless system integrations, which makes our platform simple and easy to integrate, even in system environments that historically have been difficult to integrate with. Our experts support you and your employees throughout the entire process. We set up all the configurations based on your preferences and our experience from prior projects. Billogram is a tech company, which means that we have the internal resources for constantly developing solutions based on the end customer’s needs. We also have extensive experience, expertise and business intelligence in the payment market, which enables us to offer you a scalable, future-proof solution that always stays up to date and is aligned with the latest regulations and standards.

Want to know more? Contact us!