Organizations are turning away from legacy, monolithic platforms as these decades-old IT systems add management, flexibility and agility to their tightly entwined components. CIOs have shifted towards building their own web application platforms with a set of best-in-class tools for greater flexibility, customization and agile DevOps. However, this choice is not correct in all circumstances. In fact, it can lock you into rigid options like a monolithic platform.
Gartner warns that building your own platform is complex, time consuming and may not save you money. Independently developing, testing, deploying and scaling your infrastructure requires expertise, agility and a shift in team responsibilities. A proven way to ensure a robust, flexible, and streamlined solution is to invest in a standardized front-end platform that you can build upon. here’s why.
Building distracts from your core business
Companies (eg, e-commerce businesses) that choose to build their own platform will ultimately focus on the platform rather than their core business—selling their product. Platform development includes design, coding, testing, securing, and deployment. No platform is a fire-and-forget affair.
The non-functional requirements (NFR) of the platform are also overlooked, such as ensuring maintainability, reliability, visibility, etc. Developing a custom platform requires the expertise of top talent. This talent usually prefers to create rather than keep, so this type of talent is difficult to maintain. While you can invest in your employees to foster their loyalty – it’s not as predictable as paying a fee for an always-available, all-in-one solution.
Platforms provide predictable total cost of ownership
Large IT projects are difficult to execute, especially when in-house staff are often pulled in multiple directions and distracted by other priorities. This can be costly for organizations: A recent study found that 25 to 40 percent of IT projects exceed their budget or schedule by more than 50 percent.
Modern platforms, such as Adgeo, are built to integrate application tools to reduce total cost of ownership, increase efficiency, and reduce errors. A comprehensive and streamlined solution can save your team a lot of work to deploy new updates on time and under budget.
In-house innovation can lead to lock-in and employee frustration
A survey by Freshworks found that nine out of 10 employees are frustrated with the technology in their workplace, and if they are not provided with the tools, technology and information they need to do their job, the majority would consider finding a new employer. Will do
Custom platforms are usually bundled with different tools from multiple vendors, which makes them difficult to use. The more customized the in-house platform, the more the company gets involved in it. This limits the ability to adopt new tools, techniques and technologies to innovate. It’s like vendor lock-in with a monolithic platform, but one that was built inside the company.
In turn, this can lead to slower workflow and increased frustration. More than 5,000 DevOps professionals shared details about their processes, and 69% reported wanting more consolidation due to hidden costs, insufficient agility, and the time maintenance takes away from managing security and compliance.
Don’t lose your employees and operational efficiency to ineffective and inefficient tools and workflows.
multibillion dollar total investment
Custom platforms are often poorly documented and maintained, and increasingly difficult to use, increasing time to market. This is unforgivable in today’s current economy. In fact, McKinsey found organizations with high developer velocity outperformed competitors in the market by up to five times.
A standardized front-end platform that facilitates continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), for example using serverless functions operated by all companies using the solution, can deliver significant value to each. There are many other companies using the solution, and their total investment will always exceed your potential investment in your own platform. Investing in your own tooling would never scale like this.
To make or not to make?
In today’s fast-paced software development landscape, investing in a robust platform provides a more cost-effective and streamlined solution. This enables companies to focus on their core business objectives and reduce the burden of developing and maintaining customized platforms that limit their ability to innovate.
Companies must be strategic in their tool choices and recognize the importance of investing in a reliable front-end platform for their web applications that facilitates CI/CD and allows you to build with flexibility.
Adgeo operates a globally scaled edge CDN network with a vertically integrated frontend platform for web apps and APIs. Click here to know more.