I actually had quite opposite about this particular area. At the time we were to develop particular product for a client company. The product would've greatly benefited from using workflow engine. I did some shopping around, talked to sales reps and have discovered that we would have to shell out at least $350K for our particular case. So I've proposed to the boss that I would quickly build one that would cover basics. The boss has agreed and I built it in about one month. It worked fine for what it was intended for.
After a while we have approached a vendor (the one we would have paid those 350K for their wares). We showed them what we have built, how it was used. They were impressed enough and we became sales and implementation partners. They have routed a gobbles of jobs, training and installations for us to do.
As for original home built engine - over the time we have replaced it with the one from our partner without much troubles.
I had very similar experience. We built a custom workflow engine, with visual designer in a few weeks, which then went with our DMS custom solution. Any workflow engine we tested, before or after the build, was either too complex or too expensive. We had few bugs and newbie mistakes in ours, but nothing too bad. We sold few more installations quickly because we could implement any customer need promptly. It's now more than 10 years and I moved on, but the company is still selling the engine with other solutions. I would say, a big win for build vs buy.
I actually had quite opposite about this particular area. At the time we were to develop particular product for a client company. The product would've greatly benefited from using workflow engine. I did some shopping around, talked to sales reps and have discovered that we would have to shell out at least $350K for our particular case. So I've proposed to the boss that I would quickly build one that would cover basics. The boss has agreed and I built it in about one month. It worked fine for what it was intended for.
After a while we have approached a vendor (the one we would have paid those 350K for their wares). We showed them what we have built, how it was used. They were impressed enough and we became sales and implementation partners. They have routed a gobbles of jobs, training and installations for us to do.
As for original home built engine - over the time we have replaced it with the one from our partner without much troubles.
Win win for everyone involved