Working for a telecommunications company certainly opens up a range of opportunities for a young engineer. I discovered this firsthand when I joined Tampereen Puhelin and began working on my master’s thesis. In the early days of my career, I was designing and implementing core and access networks: routing, switching, traffic exchange, broadband, etc.

After joining the internet and telecoms company Jippii, I continued working on similar tasks, and I dedicated some of my free time to coding as a hobby. I built a Linux-based “set-top box” PC for recording TV shows and streaming them for personal use. The open source-based project took a couple of years, but by 2004, it featured some impressive capabilities for its time: a pretty sleek web UI for recording shows, support for pay TV channels, streaming for recordings, hopping over commercial breaks, etc.

One day over a lunch break, I demonstrated my pet project to a few colleagues. While they thought it was pretty cool, we probably didn’t think too much about it at that time.

After some time had passed, my colleagues had realized that cloud services were set to become the next big trend in the industry. Recalling my lunch demo, they came back to me and we brainstormed together. As a result, my original hobby project was reimagined as a cloud-based concept and a new Internet service.

Without that very random lunch demo, most probably nothing would have happened. At the same time, nothing would have happened without my colleagues and their ideas and excellent thinking. I wouldn’t necessarily call it “innovation” as that sounds a bit forced. It was probably a combination of out-of-the-box thinking, passion, a combination of talents – and a bit of luck.

By then, Jippii had become Saunalahti and was soon to be acquired by Elisa. The opportunities to further refine my initial home set-top box downright exploded. The software was developed into Elisa Viihde – a streaming service that seamlessly blends a set-top box and easy usability. Currently, hundreds of thousands of households have subscribed to Elisa Viihde. We were the frontrunner in this type of service, and nowadays all the other big Finnish operators have similar services.

This rundown is just one example of how one idea can reach new heights in the hands of a company with the right kind of knowledge, resources, and ambition. Elisa Viihde has been designed and developed – and still runs – very much on our own code, including user interfaces, mobile clients, and backend systems – even the content delivery network is developed in-house by Elisa.

Back when we started, there were no readily available commercial components for this kind of use, so we built everything by hand on top of Linux boxes. Nowadays, the situation is different – and that raises the question of how we should be doing it today.

When should you use COTS, and when should you do it yourself?

The answer to when it makes sense to do design and develop software in-house and when it’s better to use commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions largely depends on the company, its culture, and even its revenue model. At Elisa, we believe in doing things better than our competitors and in using our expertise to add value to customers. We do not see ourselves as a mere pass-through pipe for bits. We want to keep developing advanced, comprehensive digital services, and we believe that to be able to do that as well as possible, we need to assume and maintain full control of all things that are involved.

The software vendors have business models of their own, and they do not necessarily align seamlessly with our objectives. Quite understandably, they want to generate as much business as possible and develop their offering according to that. However, this often leads to situations where, for example, the personalization opportunities are way too limited for Elisa’s purposes. And, if we can tailor something to fit our needs, our competitors have the same options at their disposal. How do you find a competitive advantage in that landscape?

There are also various cost-related issues to consider. Whenever contracts are renewed, the eternal haggle over the pricing model becomes a hot topic. After all, as Elisa has literally millions of subscriptions, even a tiny increase in cost per unit leads to a significant total. Add the cost of changing service providers and having to replace components within services, and it’s easy to understand what kind of jungle we can end up in when managing a fleet of vendors and their products.

However, this does not mean that we should avoid working with software vendors altogether. It all comes down to when it makes sense – and when it doesn’t. The sweet spot is often found in systems of differentiation and innovation. Developing an HR or other back-office system yourself is unlikely to significantly add customer value in your market.

It’s typically wise to leave various subsystems, databases, and other established components for a vendor to take care of, but even in those situations, it is worthwhile thinking twice about what we can do by ourselves and what we should buy as a service. In addition to commercial alternatives, a wide variety of supported open-source components are available in public cloud services. Every situation is different, and every component counts – we must keep our finger on the pulse of development to maintain a clear overview of the available options.

Boiling down to culture

Having said that, the ideal outcome to a battle between doing things in-house and buying software services is very seldom rigorously found in the last column of a spreadsheet.

First and foremost, nurturing the competence of our digital service teams is a matter of honor for us. We take immense pride in our comprehensive capabilities and our innovative spirit.

This leads to how we want to perceive ourselves. We do not want to settle for being a system integrator – albeit an extremely capable one. Instead, we see ourselves as a full-service digital engineering house that designs and develops cutting-edge solutions that genuinely add value to our customers’ lives.

It takes plenty of commitment to make that a reality. At the same time, it takes a lot of effort to ensure that our skilled experts have all the tools and support to be the best they can be. If they have an idea and the ability to make it real, they can leverage their skillset to its full potential and bring their vision alive. Nowadays, with the help of AI tooling, the path from vision to product is faster than ever before.

As an outcome, our own pool of talent grows, while our people perceive the work as meaningful and important. Communication, pride, appreciation, and the spirit of doing things well are all in place. We have what it takes to handle every challenge just the right way – and we know when it makes sense to do something ourselves and when it makes sense to buy.

We are engineers and proud of it – but our culture is about so much more than numbers.