Yup. Buy, build, and borrow are pretty good categories.
But sometimes you _think_ you're buying, but you really end up borrowing
or even building. Other times, you can know and plan on "borrowing" or
"building" even when you buy a proprietary vendor product.
And as Ed mentions, another very important point -- it's also possible
to succesfully plan on "buying" an open source product, when you've got
a vendor contract from a reliable vendor for it.
Jonathan
Edward M. Corrado wrote:
Karen,
I would argue that in the cases you described below, one is not simply
Buying. You are Buying+Building. Unfortunately sometimes decision
makers may not recognize this, or don't take it into account. I think
that is something that Jeremy hints at when he says Open Source can be
a buy. My take away in this regard is that there should be some
recognition in this document that most things will be a combination of
at least 2 of the 3 Bs.
Edward
On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 9:48 AM, Karen Coyle <[email protected]> wrote:
Quoting "Frumkin, Jeremy" <[email protected]>:
In general, a Buy approach is easiest to determine TCO, while a Build
approach is the most difficult. Generally, there are more unknowns with a
Build than there are with a Buy. The more unknowns, the greater risk of
inaccurate cost estimates.
I know this is the common wisdom, but I've had experiences where Buy turned
out to be much more expensive than expected. If the product is mature and
stable and you expect to do almost no customizing, yes, then Buy is
predictable. But if you're on the cutting edge, it's a new vendor offering,
you expect to customize, then Buy can have all kinds of hidden costs. In the
end, Buy can be more expensive than Build because you have to struggle with
a product over which you have no control.
When pitting Buy v. Borrow v. Build, functionality has to be taken into
account. What do you want the software to do? How big is the market for your
functionality? (that is, are vendors likely to step up to this plate?) Are
vendors already offering this?
kc
--
Karen Coyle
[email protected] http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
