Personally, I (as a software engineer who loves to write software) would advocate buy anywhere and everywhere you can. Even your core business. In my personal

Personally, I (as a software engineer who loves to write software) would advocate buy anywhere and everywhere you can. Even your core business. In my personal experience it's rarely code that's giving you an advantage, it's more likely to be your data, your connections, your efficiency, etc. Also, try to use the product as off-the-shelf as possible. Little or no customisation. If people in your business are unable to work with a product without customisation consider firing them and replacing them with people who can before you get involved in customisations. For me the dominating factor here is human resource pool. For whatever we build there are no experts on the system except the ones who already work for us. So aside from all the build, maintenance, etc. costs associated with build, I also can't find any employees on the market who are experts or even competent in the software.