BUY
IT PROCUREMENT
Chief Technology Officer ( CTO ) Zainol Zainuddin explained : “ Merchantrade actually owns a software house , and most of our applications are built in-house . I have about 120 developers under me , who build the majority of our applications under the Microsoft technology stack . Progressive Web Apps are one interesting technology that we are looking at , so that whenever we build an application it can be platform agnostic .”
56
Emerging economies may also benefit from maintaining an internal software house , due to the prohibitive costs of pre-made solutions versus the relatively lower costs of hiring software developers . We ’ ve previously profiled the likes of Merchantrade Asia , which operates in the Malaysian financial services industry and provides a broad and diverse range of products .
Such an offering has required the building of a strong internal development team , with some of the company ’ s most crucial systems , its customer facing applications , developed internally – as
BUY
That ’ s far from the end of the story , however , with some situations mandate the buying rather than building of software .
A White Paper sponsored by software company Mobysoft outlined the superiority of a circumstantial approach to the problem , saying : “ This ‘ build or buy ’ question is one that companies have had to grapple with since the advent of computing and , with the fast pace of business digitisation , this decision is becoming ever more important to get right . There is no straightforward or generic answer to the ‘ build versus buy ’
NOVEMBER 2020