A recent IDC study, which you can read in full here, found that participants experienced five key benefits when building custom enterprise applications on the Force.com platform, compared to traditional in-house development.

Those benefits:

• Faster. Custom applications were developed and deployed in 76% less time and required 76% – 85% fewer developer hours.
• Lower cost. Companies were able to reduce their three-year TCO by 54%, saving $560,000 per application.
• Higher quality. Users of the custom applications built on the Force.com platform reduced annual downtime by 97% and spent 60% less time dealing with the service desk.
• Better performance. The combination of the first three benefits contributed to better business performance and generated an additional $3.9 million in annual revenue for each firm.

So using Force.com to build your portals is a pretty good idea—definitely better than trying to build using traditional in-house development platforms. But there’s an even better solution, one that offers top-notch performance and saves on IT costs in the long run.

Overall, purchasing Salesforce customer or partner portal licenses is a smarter, more cost-efficient decision than building a portal yourself.

I get asked about this at least twice a month. Why buy when I can build? Well, my 3+ years of experience in this area has helped me develop:

THE TOP TEN QUESTIONS TO ASK WHEN DECIDING TO BUILD OR BUY

1. Do you have the IT Resources?
Do you have the IT team with the right skills? Even if you do, is that really how you want to spend your IT resources? What is the opportunity cost of them doing this? What gets pushed?

2. Is this really a fair match?
Sure, your IT people are great, but is it really fair to expect them to build something comparable to what scores of experienced, dedicated developers at Salesforce have created over the past 10 years?

3. How much flexibility will your application have?
Will your development efforts build in flexibility to allow for any/all of the following?

• Granular user profiles?
• Robust security model (object and field level security)?
• Role hierarchy to drive record visibility?
• Workflow?
• Approval processes?

4. Do you have the hardware and software to scale?
Realistically, where will you host this solution? Will it be 99.99% available?

5. Can you measure what you manage?
When you’re done with the basic plumbing to make your application operational, will you have the budget and the time to build a flexible reporting and dashboard engine to report on your business?

6. Are you really saving money?
Factor in the price of IT, software, and hardware. Are you still saving money?

7. Are you really saving time?
Can you afford to wait 6-12 months for your IT department to build a portal? What are your competitors doing?

8. Can your application grow with your business?
Your business will change. How quickly can you add new features to your custom solution? Salesforce has hundreds of plug-and-play applications.

9. Will you have a single customer view?
If you are already using Salesforce to manage customer accounts, contacts, opportunities and other customer-related data—think about it—does it really make sense to have another system?

10. Can you make it all fit together?
Do you need to integrate with external systems (orders, ERP, etc)? Salesforce provides out-of-the-box integration capabilities versus point-to-point integration, which is the likely route for home-developed applications.

To the point…

• Utilizing assets on Force.com is proven to be a better solution than building customer enterprise application compared to traditional in-house development
• In this economy, you need every edge you can get—so make sure you carefully evaluate the build vs. buy decision before you make it
• There are numerous reasons why purchasing Salesforce portal licenses can be a better business decision than attempting to build portals in-house

If you need advice regarding how to implement Salesforce Customer and Partner Portals for your organization, contact Apprivo for a free, no-obligation consultation.