Custom-Built or Off-the-Shelf Software?

A Software used in most organizations is a mixture of custom developed/home grown versions, or off-the-shelf ones that have been customized as per business requirements. It makes sense to delve into the reasons for choosing either type of software.

There are many reasons for getting software custom developed. Maybe there's no off-the-shelf package that matches your exact requirements, or maybe it's too expensive. In either case, you'll go for a local software developer to do the job for you.

Chances are that you'll easily find a local partner who'll do it at a very good price (because competition is tough in this space). Not only that, but the local developer will design the application exactly as per your business requirements, and will perhaps implement it in much lesser time.

While the prospects of low cost and an exact match to your business need are certainly lucrative, custom software has its share of drawbacks as well. The biggest of them is scalability. Since it's been built keeping the immediate requirements in mind, chances are that it may not be able to scale up as your business grows.

Not only that, but over a period of time, technologies will change, and your system will become outdated. It would become extremely difficult to make any changes to it, or get it fixed in case of a problem.

The vendor may have moved on by that time or shut shop, or may not have the manpower who understands your old technology. So you'll be stuck with an old platform. Getting another vendor to fix your custom software is possible, but it would be time consuming to understand the custom code from scratch.

Many organizations even use their own in-house expertise for developing customized apps. With so much open source software floating around, and with so many free IDEs available, it's only natural to resort to this. Here again, organizations need to keep in mind that the customized apps will function well till the time the manpower who developed it is around.

Off-the-shelf software on the other hand, could be more expensive, but have many advantages. For one, there's an organization to back it up, which is constantly developing it, doing bug fixes, and introducing newer versions with more features. Finding the manpower to support it therefore would not be as difficult as for custom built/home grown software. Scalability won't be an issue either because of the newer versions being constantly developed.

It's important to keep these points in mind about custom built and off-the-shelf software, because the wrong choice could cost you dearly.