Industry Debate: Buy Versus Build

We’ve been hearing some noise in the industry that acquired technology is inferior to building it in-house from the ground up. Since acquisitions are part of pretty much any successful tech company’s growth strategy today, I thought it’d be worth some discussion.

Technology just moves too quickly to invent everything all by yourself. It’s hard to name one successful technology company that has not made acquisitions. Cisco, as an example, has built their company around well-thought-out acquisitions that they then integrate successfully.

Amcom, as well, has acquired companies to build out portions of our suite to fit customer needs with a broad solution set. Our customers have told us that this is what they want—a full set of software solutions that work together. This is preferable to having a bunch of software applications that are thrown into a ‘suite’ from several different companies’ technologies and crossing your fingers that they work flawlessly together without any help (because they won’t).

The ultimate proof point of a successful technology company is having many installed, happy customers. Amcom has this in spades. Our solutions are field proven and in use every day. We don’t subscribe to N.I.H. (‘Not Invented Here’ - so therefore bad) but instead we strive to create solutions that work well and deliver value for our customers.

Our customers also know that we will be around tomorrow. We have been in business more than 25 years, have more than $50 million in sales, and are growing and profitable. No one will wake up tomorrow and find that we are out of business. Incidentally, we spend more on research and development than some of our competitors have in total sales. We are building plenty of solutions ourselves and making meaningful enhancements to others all the time.

We want to solve our customers’ problems so they can meet the requirements of the changing communications landscape. Most of what we deliver we will create ourselves. However, there is some functionality our customers want very quickly, and we will make acquisitions where it makes sense. We believe this serves our customers well, and serving customers well is our real goal.

So when it comes to comparing buy versus build, it’s not like comparing apples to orangutans as some software companies out there want buyers to believe. Actually, it’s like comparing apples, to, well, apples in my book if the acquisitions are done well. As in the case of Amcom, we’ve built a lot of technology from scratch over the years. We’ve also made acquisitions. But the technology acquired was built from the ground up at well-respected organizations. And what we acquired was exactly that – organizations. So that means it’s solid technology but also much more. This includes development and QA teams, product experts, leadership staff, and other important personnel and knowledge.

Drop us a note to let us know your perspective on the buy versus build topic.