Several times a month companies call me to discuss the merits of buying a mobile software platform , to develop software for mobile handheld PDAs, with a development environment vs. attempting to build their own. My first answer is you can build it! MobileDataforce did. It tooks us 4.5 years and over 40 engineering-man-years to develop the PointSync Mobility Platform. It can certainly be done by others. The key questions are:
- How much time do you have to develop the mobile software application?
- How many software engineers do you have available to develop the mobile application?
- Do they have any experience designing, developing and deploying enterprise quality mobile applications?
- What is your development budget?
- It is hard to develop your very first mobile application...are you patient...is the business unit sponsoring the project patient?
- Are your software developers mobile application security experts?
- Do you have software developers that eat, sleep and breath synchronization?
- What are the time to market requirements. Are you losing business or money by not having the mobile application done?
- Who is going to support the mobile application after the original developers leave the company?
- Who is going to document the mobile application and know how it works?
- Who will pay to update the mobile application next year when the available handheld devices require an OS upgrade and changes to the application?
Again, any smart group of software engineers can, given enough time and budget, develop a working mobile application. The real questions - is this your core business and is this the best use of your time and budget? Especially since a relatively low cost mobile software platform and development environment already exists and can be purchased and downloaded in an afternoon.
The following link goes to another blog article with a list of "buy vs. build" articles.
No comments:
Post a Comment