2) Are you planning to manage project, and project team(s), yourself? And/or are you planning to “outsource” part to all of management of your project? What are costs in terms of time, effort and money for each of these alternatives? Which of these alternatives has minimum risks to successful completion of your application development project?, These are *important* considerations as failing to complete development of your application(s) may make pursuing this option very costly!

3) What are costs – time, effort and/or money – to also develop documentation and training (if applicable) for your application(s)?

4) How do you plan to support developed application(s)? By training “in house” staff to support it? And/or engaging external developers and/or support staff?

5) How do you plan to handle maintenance on this new application(s)? Do you have source code? Do you plan to handle future maintenance yourself / “in house”? and/or Are you going to engage original development team (assuming they are willing and available) to make any future additions and/or changes to your system(s)? If so have you negotiated / “locked in” a rate for these future maintenance efforts?

Etc. Etc.

Now, let us look at “Buy” option.

Some of advantages of “Buy” option include:

1) The time to get a package solution implemented such that you may start using it and reaping corresponding benefits for your business is typically quicker than that for building application “from scratch”.

2) The initial purchase price of a software package, although it may be considerable, is often less than (initial) custom development costs.

3) The software vendor may deliver regular maintenance upgrades to software package, including a number of “bug fixes” and/or enhancements, which you may receive for a “fixed maintenance fee” such that you do not have to bear costs of all these “bug fixes” and enhancements alone.

Some of disadvantages of “Buy” option include:

1) A COTS package may not satisfy all your business requirements/needs and may not fit your specific business processes well “out of box”. The software vendor may or may not be willing and able to modify package to better fit your business requirements and/or processes and even if so, this may be costly.

2) A software package may be less able to quickly adapt to changes in your business needs and/or processes. You may have to wait for vendor’s next maintenance release to get changes you want, or you may have to pay vendor to make these changes specifically just for you and wait for them, or they may not be willing (and/or able) to make these changes to their software package for you at all.

Briefly here are also just a few of additional factors that, IMHO, you may want to consider in evaluating / selecting a package solution(s), as part of your “Buy options”, including:

1) What is additional time and cost, if it is even possible / an option, to modify package to satisfy your current requirements/needs? A “general rule of thumb” I have used over years is that … If you have to modify 50% or more of “code” to make it meet your needs, then you are probably better off re-writing it “from scratch”, you know?

2) Is it maintainable? Meaning, will you, vendor, and/or developers you engage be able to modify package to meet any changes in your current and/or future requirements/needs? If not, then this package may become “shelfware” should your needs change at some point, you know?

3) How well does it integrate and/or “play well” with other applications in your overall application architecture? If it does not “interface nicely” with other applications in your overall application architecture and it will need to, then you may find that you will need to have these interfaces custom developed. Therefore, you should also consider development of these interfaces in “Total cost of ownership” of this package, right?

4) What kinds of documentation, training and support are available? And how good are they? Bottom line … a package you and/or your staff can’t use isn’t worth much now is it?

Etc. Etc.

Granted, again, there is a lot more to both a good formal “Buy vs. Build” analysis and/or Software Selection process, as discussed above, but …

Once you have narrowed it down to top “scoring” candidate COTS software packages from your Software Selection process, this along with your assessment of advantages, disadvantages and costs of “Buy” vs. “Build” alternative, as discussed above, will allow you to make a good informed decision about which solution is better for you and your business, namely to “Build” or “Buy”, in this case, right?

I hope that discussions herein will at least help everyone see value (and potential time, effort and money savings) of performing a “Buy vs. Build” analysis and/or a Software Selection process “up front” vs. ending up with something that either doesn’t meet your (short- and/or long-term) needs and/or is too costly to maintain.

If you have any further questions regarding and/or would like further assistance with any of this, please feel free to contact us via contact information available below.

I hope this all helps you all and Have a Great Day! :)

- Michael S. DeVries

This brings us to what is potentially greatest savings that SIP provides. We all hate to have to pay $2.00 for making a simple local call from a hotel room. But for those of us that have had to pay exorbitant long-distance charges from hotels, level of angst felt reaches new heights. Add to this fact that often companies require conference calling for their employees, a service that hotels are all too happy to charge a high premium to provide. For companies that have a lot of their employees traveling or practicing in various locales, overhead costs of making such calls can really put a damper on year end profits. SIP offers a solution to hotel bills, and for that matter all telephone bills whatsoever. Just as sending an e-mail is free whether you are sending that e-mail to a person across street or around world, so making a call using SIP from any locale to any other locale in world is free. All that is needed is a broadband connection. And just as one can send an email from wherever internet can be accessed, SIP users can make their free calls from office, home, or even (gasp) hotel room. Not to mention huge savings in regular long-distance charges, simple fact that long distance and local calls can be made for free from hotel rooms (most of which offer complimentary broadband service) is an enormous long-term cost savings. But add to this fact that conference calls are available at no additional cost, which can be explained by following principle that sending an e-mail to many individuals at same time is just as cheap as one to one communication. Altogether these savings mean that companies who have in past been laden with high local and long distance phone bills will be able to have their employees keep in close communication no matter their location for free.

SIP goes beyond this, however. Because SIP uses peer-to-peer connections there are no extra costs for having hundreds or even thousands of employees making SIP calls whereas management costs for such a system under traditional telephony would be astronomical. This is never case with PBXs that utilize SIP in a peer to peer connection format, however, where structural costs do not increase as your business grows and your usage of PBX increases.

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) offers customers of traditional telephony fantastic cost savings, flexibility to make free calls from anywhere in world at any time, and ability to expand a PBX system with no setup costs. Because there is no complicated hardware or software necessary to setup SIP in a PBX, implementing technology is as simple as having access via broadband to internet. Due to these benefits as well as innumerable others, expanded use of SIP in PBX and in a variety of other settings is simply a matter of expanded customer exposure to possibilities of SIP.