Build Versus Buy (part II)

I wrote on this topic recently – Building Your Own versus Buying. I also wrote a little about what technology you sould be working on HERE.

At the Open Source session at ITEXPO, someone in the audience talked about open source use because he could control it more, customize it more and offer stuff that maybe the commercial softswitch couldn’t. I didn’t rebut him because it had to percolate, but I don’t see too many of the 2000+ VoIP providers offering anything cool. They all offer about the same thing. So if you are going to build it, build something cool like Slack, not a hobbled together cheaper version of Broadsoft.

People aren’t really buying technology. They are buying outcomes. It is about getting to market fast; not getting to market eventually. There are a couple of ISPs that talked and talked and tinkered and came to market months later. The window of opportunity that they would have had shrunk.

The window of opportunity for a lot of stuff is shrinking, especially for UCaaS. To many players in the space and two giants that will soon be battling it out – Cisco and Microsoft.

Also during the Open Source session, many expressed a small problem: finding talent is becoming harder. Talent to run the open source software is getting expensive. Just another thing to think about.

Seth Godin this morning had a post about Loose/tight, thoughts on management. When to hire employees, when to outsource. It is the same concept I am trying to convey but he does it better.