Rethinking build vs. buy: A hybrid approach

It’s one of the most frequently asked and debated questions among organizations building their own software applications: Should we build custom software or buy an off-the-shelf solution? The answer is a strategic one.

A common, but inaccurate misconception is that choosing to build is the only way to get a solution tailored to your unique needs. The truth is that modern teams no longer build everything from the ground up — they assemble. This process typically involves buying specialized components and assembling them to create your dream reporting solution, thereby accelerating delivery without sacrificing flexibility. It allows your development team to focus on the core functions of your product.

This article aims to analyze what this looks like and how your business can adopt it to gain a competitive edge. Let’s dive in.

Strategic assembly: It’s not “build or buy,” it’s build and buy

Build and buy choices can co-exist and work together to give your business a competitive advantage. You don’t always have to choose one over the other. Your business can build proprietary value where it matters most, then integrate proven tools like Jaspersoft reporting and embedded analytics. This is essentially strategic assembly.

If you’re an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) or develop and sell software applications to other businesses, reporting and analytics drive decisions. They help your end customers to generate critical reports, extract insights, and make informed decisions directly from your application.

This can significantly enhance user experience and drive product adoption. At some point, the reporting functionality can even become a key selling point that sets your solution apart from your competitors in the market. That’s why it’s essential to leverage a proven reporting tool with years of performant experience.

At the end of the day, strategic assembly is more than just a development approach — it’s a business strategy. It lets you position your solution to scale faster and deliver more value to your customers, which in turn helps you stay ahead of your competition.

The hidden cost of building (everything)

Building might make you feel like you have control until the costs start adding up. Some hidden costs can include:

• Lost focus on core value: Every minute of effort that is not spent on building your differentiator translates to lost opportunities. If you take the focus of your development team away from enhancing and advancing your product’s unique value proposition, your competitors are gaining an advantage.
• Delayed time-to-market: Building a reporting tool in your product can take months — sometimes years. Any delays in launching the production today's fast-moving and highly competitive market mean lost opportunities and market share.
• Ongoing technical debt: If you build the reporting functionality in-house, you must continue to maintain the reporting functionality in house, leaving your valuable tech team overstretched with responsibilities that are not core to your business.
• Compliance and regulation risks: For industries that require strict adherence to compliance to data processing and reporting standards, precision is vital. Getting this wrong could potentially place your customers at risk and ensuring a home-grown reporting tool meets these standards also increases risk.

Customization without compromise

One of the major reasons why OEMs prefer to build reporting and analytics tools in-house is customization. It’s often hard to believe that you can buy an off-the-shelf solution that can deliver the same level of flexibility without forcing major trade-offs. But it isn’t entirely impossible.

Take Jaspersoft, for instance, which allows for customization. This is possible because it leverages web standards like JavaServer Pages (JSP) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and is built on the Spring Framework.

Jaspersoft provides a custom CSS stylesheet, which allows you to customize how reports look and feel when embedded in your product. You can change the fonts, background, colors, and logo, and customize them so the end users have a unified view of your product and the embedded analytics. Jaspersoft also supports several deployment options, including on-premises, cloud, and hybrid deployments. Specifically, its open-source nature gives developers the flexible endpoints and control to integrate it into any environment.

In addition to customization, Jaspersoft offers other added advantages, including:

Ad hoc reporting

With Jaspersoft, your users can create reports and data visualizations without needing technical assistance. This is made possible because Jaspersoft has an interactive user interface that allows pivoting, drilling, interactive charting, and filtering. It also features several built-in calculations that support advanced reporting for all types of users.

Pixel-perfect reports

Jaspersoft lets you design any document, report, or form that you need. You can also create reports in different formats, including printed PDFs and interactive web reports. It also saves you development time for your design by using externalized style sheets. This means that you can create a design, then reuse it for your other reports. You can also update the design all at once by making changes to your external stylesheet. This feature is important for maintaining consistency, especially in highly regulated industries, such as financial services, health, and government.

Data source agnostic

Like most organizations, your business most likely gets its data from multiple sources. This can be problematic if the reporting tool you use doesn’t support one or several of the sources. With Jaspersoft, you can pull data from different sources without any issues. For instance, you can build reports from several databases, such as JSON, XML, or RestAPI.

What strategic assembly looks like

ERAMON GmbH, a software development company, wanted to provide its customers with real-time analytics inside its network management platform.

However, they didn’t want to stray too far from their area of expertise, so ERAMON decided to use Jaspersoft. ERAMON developers leveraged Jaspersoft’s ad hoc reporting, customization capabilities, and flexible deployment to build premium reporting and create a new revenue stream.

Strategic assembly saved ERAMON significant time while also translating into higher average order values for the company.

Build smarter and faster with Jaspersoft

Today’s global market is highly competitive and extremely fast-paced. With Jaspersoft, you can build in customizable, flexible reporting and help reduce time to market, development costs, and your team's technical burden while offering end users an intuitive, embedded analytics experience that enhances engagement and satisfaction.

Learn more about Jaspersoft embedded analytics.