Is your time worth more than $2.00 per hour? 

If so, when you have a SAML Single Sign On (SSO) project, the ROI analysis is clear:

You should buy an Enterprise SAML product vs trying to build your own custom SAML solution using on an Open Source SAML Toolkit.

Clients tell us that they frequently spend anywhere from 2-12 weeks, or 80-480 man hours, to deploy their initial SAML implementation.

SSO Easy’s Single Sign On SAML solutions start as low as $1,000.  For this price, the result is often a complete SAML 2.0 or SAML 1.1 solution, fully implemented.

For the most efficient customer experiences, where 80 man hours are required to build a custom SAML solution, if their cost of labor is greater than $12.50 per hour, they would be better off buying SSO Easy’s SAML product.

For the less efficient customer experiences, where 480 man hours are required to build a custom SAML solution, if their cost of labor is only slightly greater than $2.00 per hour, they would be better off buying SSO Easy’s SAML product.

Longer term, the gap widens when ongoing support and maintenance is considered.  With the Build approach, internal labor cost increases as the custom SAML solution needs to be supported, tweaked, upgraded and changed by internal staff.  With SSO Easy’s product solution, support is provided by the vendor, and product updates and updates are provided for free to clients under the standard support contract.

When looking to implement a SAML solution, the following things need to be considered as part of the decision making process:

• Type of use case enabled
• Complexity of the implementation
• Number of SAML connections
• Time required to implement a connection
• SAML expertise required
• Programming resources required
• SourceTarget application modifications
• Maintenance effort
• Maintenance responsibility

With many different options available in the marketplace, invariably it comes to building a solution (using open source libraries or toolkits) versus buying a turnkey product from a vendor.  If consider the above list, when you are evaluating “Build vs. Buy” ROI analysis, here is what you will most likely come up with: