The 4C's to consider when building or buying an IoT solution

Control – how important is it to have complete control of the solution and what does control actually mean? Do you foresee a situation where you sell the technology as a business? If not, and assuming your software vendor can provide custom changes in a reasonably agile way then control isn’t a good reason to build.

Cost – should be analysed both in terms of the build cost and the maintenance cost. Experts indicate that one should invest 15%-25% of build cost annually in order to keep a software solution relevant and functional. A lot of this investment is in technical refactoring and/or re-platforming which doesn’t bring direct value. Now that SaaS has largely replaced the perpetual licence model the initial investments are much lower. Traditionally a custom off-the-shelf [COTS] project would start with a hefty licence payment followed by a project that runs for years. But with SaaS one can “test the water” for a lower investment.

Capability – talks to two areas being a) internal capability to build and b) the external capability of the software available in the market as an alternative. Generally it doesn’t make sense to build what is already built unless you are certain the long term total cost of ownership [TCO] will be much lower than buying.

Complexity – the fact is that software development and deployment has become much more complex over the past decades. With this complexity comes significant benefit but one needs to understand that a modern solution probably has 10 to 20 different technologies in the solution stack. That’s a lot of things to be good at. Add to this the rise of cyber risk and security threat which is an expert field. Generally it will take 4+ highly trained specialists to create a build competence and this gets to 6+ when you add technical support and possibly even more if you create coverage for single man dependencies.

Kevin Gray has been building software solutions for 35 years and has a passion for solving real business problems, and is further a proponent of cloud and microservices-based architectures. This piece is a snippet a real life case study where a business problem was solved by using Trinity’s cloud based IoT platform. To download the full FREE whitepaper, (including real-life cost analysis), click here.