At some point, every company hits the same wall. You’ve got too many systems, too many dependencies, and too little patience. You want to move faster, but every change means three meetings, fiveintegrations, and a risk assessment. So you ask the question everyone asks: “Should we buy something new? Replatform? Or build something ourselves?”

‍

That’s the wrong question.
‍

1.   The myth of “the right platform”

Most companies thinksoftware is like picking a car. You test-drive a few, choose one that looks solid, and hit the road. But enterprise software isn’t a vehicle. It’s the road network itself.

‍

Every choice you make determines what routes you can take next. Buy the wrong thing, and you’re stuck on someone else’s highway. Build everything yourself, and you’re paving roads by hand, forever.

‍

Neither scales.
‍

2. Why “buy vs. build” always backfires

Let’s get concrete.

‍

A Dutch insurer spent 18 months implementing a new claims platform. It worked… Until they needed to add cyber insurance. The vendor said: “Great idea. It’s on our roadmap for next year.” By the time the feature shipped, a startup competitor had already launched it, and captured the niche.

‍

That’s buying. You move fast early, then slow down forever. Sure, you’ll be live in weeks. But you’ll also be locked into someoneelse’s idea of how your business should work. Every competitor who buys the same system gets the same capabilities you do. Your “digital transformation” becomes a race to sameness.

‍

Another firm tried to escape that fate by building its own product engine. It was perfect, until the two lead developers left. Now every tweak costs €40K in change requests from whoever dares to touch the code.

‍

That’s building. You move slow early, then stop altogether.

‍

Build it yourself? Congratulations, you own it, and the technical debt,the key-person risk, and the soul-crushing realization that you’re now in thesoftware business whether you wanted to be or not.

‍

Different paths. Same ending: youlose control.
‍

3. The quiet revolution: Buy and Build

The problem isn’t technology. It’s framing. “Buy or build?” assumes those are your only options. They’re not. Most businesses don’t need everything custom. They also don’t need everything generic. What they need is selective control: The ability to decide which parts of the business run on standard rails and which parts define their competitive edge. You need the boring stuff to just work, payments, user management, notifications. Nobody wins awards for a creative login screen. But the workflows that make you different? Those you need to shape yourself.

‍

Jeff Bezos once said, “We can’t be tied to the tools of today, we have to be tied to the problems of tomorrow.”

‍

That’s exactly what composability does: it unchains you from tools so you can focus on solving the right problems. The real shift isn’t what you buy or build… It’s where you do it. In a composable world, everything (the proven and the unique) lives on one coherent platform.

‍

Not a tangle of SaaS tools held together with APIs, but a unified environment where every component, whether bought or built, shares the same architecture, data, and language.

‍

That’s composability.
Not Buy vs. Build.
Buy + Build = Blend.

‍

The result isn’t twenty disconnected apps. It’s one application that fits your business and evolves without breaking itself.

‍

That’s how you move fast and stay incontrol.
Not with more technology, but with better structure.
‍

4. The power shift nobody's talking about

When you stop stitching applications together and start composing on one platform, something powerful happens…. Control moves. It moves away from vendors and contracts, and back to the people who actually run the business.

‍

Your CIO stops spending half her time negotiating roadmaps and starts designing what’s next.

‍

Your CFO stops being ambushed by Year-2 integration costs.

‍

Your COO stops saying, “We’d love to, butthe system doesn’t allow it.”

‍

And your CEO finally leads a company that sets its own pace. Not one dictated by vendor roadmaps or quarterly release cycles.

‍

That’s what composability really delivers: a company that can change direction without rewriting its core.

‍

That’s not a technology shift. That’s a power shift.
‍

5. The uncomfortable truth

Speed used to be a competitive advantage. Now it’s just table stakes. Every company is moving fast. The SaaS market made sure of that. But control? That's still rare. That's still valuable. And that’s what separates the companies that scale from the ones that stall. After watching hundreds of organizations wrestle with digital change, one pattern keeps showing up: the winners aren’t the ones withthe flashiest tech stack. They’re the ones who stay in control when everything shifts around them.

‍

I’ve seen it firsthand. Take Maia, one of our customers. Their team ships new features almost daily. Not because they work longer hours, but because they work on a platform that lets them change safely.They can update individual components without touching the rest of theapplication. Add new modules to existing apps without full redeployments. They can test an idea on Tuesday and launch it by Thursday. They can evolve their business model without asking three vendors and a systems integrator for permission.

‍

That agility? That's not a feature you can buy. It's a capability you have to own.

‍

And once you have it, you don’t just move faster… You move freely.
‍

6. What this means for you

Stop thinking about software as something you can buy. Start thinking about it as something you compose. Take the best of what exists. Build only what differentiates you. But do it all in one place, where everything connects, where change doesn't mean chaos, where your business logic lives in your house. Because in five years,your competitors will have access to the same AI, the same cloud infrastructure, the same talent pool. Technology will keep leveling the field. But the ability to change faster than anyone else? That’s the advantage no one can copy.
‍

‍
You’re not just choosing software, you’re choosing control. The question is: how much of that control do you actually have? Are you still waiting on vendor roadmaps, or do you already decide your own?

‍

Next Up: S01E02 – The Billion-Dollar Translation Problem (and how Ontology fixesthat)
Every system runs on language. But what happens when every app speaks a different one? In the next episode, we’ll break down the secret ingredient that keeps composable applications coherent, and why every great system starts with ashared vocabulary. Stay tuned.

‍

About Novulo Explained
Novulo Explained uncovers thehidden mechanics of modern enterprise software. It’s where strategy meets architecture. How ideas like composability, shared language, and AI-ready design are quietly reshaping how companies build, grow, and stay in control.