Buying vs. Building Business Analytics

Providing analytics functionality to your end users can create a number of benefits – such as higher user satisfaction, competitive advantages for your business, and accelerated overall growth. As a part of this process, almost every development organization is faced with a fundamental question – whether to build the required analytics functionality in-house or to buy that functionality from a business intelligence software vendor.

While building analytics features may work in the short run, a ‘buy’ approach makes the best business sense for most embedded analytics deployments. This brief compares the ‘build’ and ‘buy’ approaches to embedded and OEM BI projects along several dimensions:

• Up-front development costs
• Time to market
• Ongoing release and maintenance costs
• Support and training costs
• Core competency focus