The build or buy decision is something that business leaders must make in various situations in an enterprise. Let’s look at the reasons why it’s beneficial to use an off-the-shelf, white labeled, marketplace like Amplify Enterprise marketplace, compared to building your own.
Some companies buy a Marketplace from a reputable vendor. For example, Axway’s Amplify Enterprise Marketplace.
Other companies entertain the idea of building a marketplace themselves, saying that they could save money and deliver exactly what they want.
Let’s compare the two options.
When you buy a marketplace, you get a ready to use product with many built-in features, support, and maintenance.
If it’s a product being used by many other customers, it is industry proven.
There are costs associated with this approach, and your chosen vendor might not have the features you want or need.
When you build your own marketplace, you may build exactly what you want, but it takes a lot of time to deliver something useful.
While companies may feel that building a marketplace is not expensive, you must still account for the associated development and infrastructure costs.
This is also a time intensive task that will delay your digital initiatives, and you may need additional workforce skills that may not be available within your organization. A dedicated team is needed for maintenance and support, and security could be a problem.
Security issues exist, even if you purchase a marketplace from a vendor. However, with multiple customers using the vendors’ product, they are incentivized to ship products without security issues.
Most customers are usually seeking a reputable vendor. Axway, in that regard, is the best choice due to its leadership in the industry, and it’s proven Amplify Platform that allows companies to manage APIs across many different environments, including Axway API management solutions.
We also have examples where the build versus buy decision was one that had to be made by our customers.
One of these customers is a large energy company based in Europe. They initially decided to build their own marketplace. However, after being in development for 4 years and spending close to 2 million euros, the customer didn’t see the expected results in terms of capabilities, delivery timeframe, stability of the platform, and ease of maintenance. The decision was then made to stop the project and purchase Amplify Enterprise Marketplace from Axway.
As a good partner, Axway has been working closely with this customer, introducing many requested features. These features would be beneficial to other customers.
This economy of scale can be achieved with multiple customers, which ultimately leads to a rich set of features in the marketplace.
