The principal advantage to be gained by purchasing a system off-the-shelf is that someone else claims that it will work for you and further guarantees that they will support your implementation of their software. As with any vendor, you are negotiating a relationship of mutual benefit. Always spend more time researching the company and their references than you spend listening to the sales pitch.
Things to avoid when shopping for a system:
Some of the main advantages and risks of buying an off-the-shelf content reuse system:
| Advantage | Risk |
| You are buying a proven product: it worked somewhere else. | If it doesn't work for you, what's wrong with you? |
| Your business processes are constrained to follow a proven model. | Your processes are constrained whether or not that makes any sense for your organization. |
| Without spending a large amount of your own capital, you benefit from receiving regular software updates. | The updates may wander further and further from your core needs, requiring more and more expensive customization. |
| You can budget a more or less fixed cost for support and custom services | That budget may be inadequate to meet your organization's needs. The vendor may have no additional resources to meet extraordinary needs. |
| You are investing in a limited system, providing benefit against cost. Unlike a home grown system, which must be continually justified. | You cannot, with just a little more expense, or effort reap any more result from the system. |
The deciding factor in whether to buy a vendor product, as opposed to creating a custom solution from other components, is resources. Getting any new system implemented is going to require resources. If the resources are not going to be available within your own organization, then you will need to purchase those hours from external vendors. Creating your own custom solution is going to require many more hours of development than implementing a vendor solution. If your training department is small, or your organization does not have the budget to spend on developing future capabilities, at the expense of deliverable training hours today then you may have insufficient resources to property design and implement your own system.
No system that has insufficient development resources allocated to it can compete with an off-the-shelf product. In developing that solution, the vendor can amortize development costs across many different clients. Continuing development and maintenance costs are similarly shared. Many organizations have a cultural bias toward purchasing turn-key solutions, even if they do not perform as well as custom applications. Regardless of the technical benefits bestowed by one kind of system or another, it is often better to pick the right solution that matches the business realities of the enterprise.