Internal data marketplace: To buy or to build?

In today’s data-driven economy, organizations are increasingly looking for ways to maximize the value of their data assets. And an internal data marketplace is designed to solve data access at scale, by offering a way to easily manage, share, and utilize data within an organization.

Without a data marketplace, data initiatives show relatively poor ROI — if they are even measured; technology, data, and AI projects take months and years to deliver; and you end up with low levels of data reusability — you want to build once and use often.

The reality is that until you enable flexible, governed data access, you will struggle to deliver value at any scale.

The big question: To buy or to build?

One of the key decisions is whether to build a data marketplace platform in-house or buy a purpose-built, market-proven solution, like Harbr.

While both options have their pros and cons, choosing the right path depends on a range of factors, from cost and speed of deployment to customization needs and long-term scalability.

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Purpose-built, market-proven solution

The most straightforward option is to buy a purpose-built data marketplace platform and deploy it in your own environment. Look for a vendor that has the core capabilities listed earlier and a proven track record of deploying within large organizations. Customizability, methodology, and speed to deployment are areas where vendors should differentiate themselves.

Self-build

Within this track, there is a spectrum from assembling components — with custom integration — to fully self-built. A self-built solution will be unique and the design and implementation will be under your full control. To do this, you’ll rely on internal expertise, ideally from people who have built, deployed, and managed similar systems before.

This route can cost millions of dollars, take a long time to deploy, and presents high user adoption risk. Therefore, you should ask yourself how important your unique requirements are in relation to what else is out there.

Let’s look at the pros and cons of “build versus buy” across six evaluation parameters:

  • Cost
  • Time-to-value
  • Customization
  • Capabilities
  • Operational efficiency
  • Security and compliance