Build vs. Buy Guide

As retailers look for solutions to modernize their Order Management System (OMS) / Distributed Order Management (DOM) capabilities and move to a microservices-based architecture, the market has not addressed an aspect of this journey. A typical mid-tier retailer has done a fair amount of customization within their DOM implementation over the last 20 years, all while the importance of the capability has grown both in supporting high availability and volumes as the business continues to raise its expectations for speed to market on new features.

An upgrade to the latest version of that software or a transition to a new set of microservices offered by the legacy provider both present large issues. An upgrade involves a large re-work to propagate those previous customizations into the latest version with no promise they will work as they did before. This costly endeavor adds no measurable business benefit and blocks the team from continued improvements while it’s occurring and may even require other changes in the overall environment/architecture. More importantly, the software providers in the market have given retailers very little flexibility in how these upgrades will happen because they want to maintain steep barriers to exit and intertwine key capabilities. They will involve 1-3 very large, big bang deployments that risk disrupting operations/freezing environments and resources during the whole process.

Even moving from a monolithic OMS package to a set of microservices offered by the same provider will come with a prescriptive set of steps that may or may not fit a retailer’s primary/urgent need or pain point. In addition, these steps will involve metered usage of services as they come online for maximum billing benefit of the platform.

Many of the top tier retailers have realized this interconnectedness and the risk of having too many eggs in one basket have started or completed their own multi-year journeys to disaggregate modules and migrate away from the legacy OMS solutions into a custom built, servicebased architecture that provides more agility and strategic options by separating capabilities into more atomic components. They have the engineering team sizes, capital reserves, and depth of talent that $2-20 billion sized retailers do not.

When a retailer without a war chest of resources evaluates build vs. buy in this domain there is no easy answer. Build involves a significant financial, time, and SME resource commitment, the buy option brings vendor lock in, upgrade, challenges/dependencies and risk to speed to market and non-value add re-work of any previous customizations.

- Retailers need a 3rd option to break out of this paradigm.