PLATFORMS AND MANAGED SERVICES

WHEN TO BUY A PLATFORM VERSUS BUILD IN-HOUSE In-house means done by your own team with your own resources. Consider buying when your problem is common, not special to your business, and when speed matters more than total control. Consider buying when your team is small, because every hour spent building infrastructure is an hour not spent on your actual product. Consider building when your data rules forbid sending information to outside companies, for instance when laws or contracts require the data to stay in a particular country or inside your own network. This requirement is called data residency. Consider building when the service is your core business advantage, since you should not hand your main differentiator to a vendor. Consider building when your volume is so high that the vendor's fees exceed the cost of running your own. A useful method is to estimate the total cost of ownership for each choice. Total cost of ownership includes not just the price tag, but also setup time, maintenance, staff attention, training, and the cost of problems. Be honest about building, because homemade tools need ongoing care. Someone must fix bugs, apply security updates, and answer questions from colleagues, for as long as the tool exists. Also be honest about buying, because you inherit the vendor's outages, price changes, and product decisions, and you may face a hard exit if the company changes direction. To limit risk when buying, prefer products that use open standards, keep a copy of your own data, and design your harness so that the vendor connection sits behind a thin layer you control, as suggested in Chapter 49. Finally, current vendor offerings and their prices change often. Before choosing, check each vendor's present documentation and terms, rather than trusting any list in a book.