The average enterprise now has 957 applications. That is a lot of software promising to make work easier.
Yet only 27% of those applications are integrated, leaving employees to fill the gaps by switching between systems, chasing information and piecing together the full picture themselves.
And the gap is widening. The average number of applications has increased from 897 in 2025, while the proportion connected has fallen from 29%, all according to Salesforce’s 2026 Connectivity Benchmark Report.
This means businesses are buying more software. But is it actually helping them do more, and more effectively?
When buying more software creates more work
Off-the-shelf software can be a sensible choice. When a requirement is well understood and largely the same from one organisation to another, an established product can offer a faster, lower-risk route to a solution.
The problems tend to appear when products are bought to solve individual needs without considering how the work moves between them. One platform holds the customer record. Another manages service requests. A third handles approvals. Each does its own job, but someone still has to carry the information and context from one to the next.
That someone is usually an employee.
Research suggests this adds up to far more than the odd frustrating afternoon. A 2025 Freshworks survey of more than 700 practitioners and decision-makers across six countries found that employees lost nearly seven hours a week to complicated processes and fragmented tools. On average, respondents were working across 15 software solutions and four communication channels.
One-size-fits-all software does not always remove work. Sometimes, it simply moves the work out of the system and onto the people using it.
The real cost may not appear on the invoice
The licence fee is easy to see. The cost of making disconnected software work is not.
That cost is spread across the organisation in longer handling times, repeated data entry, avoidable mistakes and customers waiting while employees search for information. Over time, these activities become so familiar that they stop looking like software problems and are simply accepted as “they way things are done here”.
The same Freshworks research found that businesses believed one in every five dollars of their software budgets was being wasted through failed implementations, underused tools and unexpected costs. More than half said they had not achieved the return on investment they expected from their software.
Even the licence itself is becoming less predictable. Zylo’s 2026 SaaS Management Index, based on more than 40 million managed licences and over $75 billion in discovered SaaS and cloud spend, found that organisations had an average of 305 SaaS applications. The size of those portfolios had barely changed year on year, yet average annual spend had risen by 8%.
AI add-ons and consumption-based pricing are helping to drive that increase. Among IT leaders surveyed by Zylo, 78% had experienced unexpected charges linked to AI features or consumption pricing, while 61% said unplanned SaaS cost increases had caused them to cut other projects.
The apparent certainty of buying can therefore be misleading. What begins as a predictable subscription may become considerably harder to forecast as functionality, pricing models and usage change.
Growth reveals where control matters
The real test comes when the business wants to do something new. A premium service is ready to launch, but the platform cannot accommodate its pricing or approval rules. The business must choose between another workaround and a delayed launch.
Commercial software platforms have to balance the priorities of many customers, which means your priority may never become theirs. Configuration and software customisation can close some gaps, but extensive changes can complicate upgrades and make the organisation even more dependent on the platform.
This is the point at which an operational inconvenience can become a strategic constraint. The business is still able to change, but only at the speed, cost and within the boundaries its software allows.
For one multinational bank, dependence on an external provider had become part of the problem. Developing an in-house counterparty risk platform gave the bank greater freedom to support new business without waiting through lengthy external change requests. Further enhancements also reduced the time required to import trade data from 24 hours to four.
The value was not custom code for its own sake. It was having greater control over how quickly a critical business capability could evolve.
Where custom software earns its advantage
Custom software delivers greater long-term value when a closer fit creates a meaningful operational or competitive advantage.
That could mean making a high-volume process faster, accommodating specialist business rules or creating a customer experience that competitors cannot easily replicate. It can also mean getting more value from technology the organisation already owns.
For a global chemical logistics company, BBD developed a custom platform connecting existing systems with a third-party tracking solution. Customers gained access to shipment visibility, arrival estimates and notifications, while service agents could answer questions faster and received fewer unnecessary enquiries.
The organisation did not need to replace everything. Custom development closed the gaps between its platforms, supported by the data engineering needed to move and transform information reliably.
These are the custom software benefits that make a commercial difference: less effort per transaction, better use of existing investments and more freedom to change what matters.
Custom is not automatically the better answer
None of this means every organisation should build every system itself.
Custom software brings its own costs and responsibilities, including discovery, engineering, security, hosting, maintenance and ongoing enhancement. A poorly scoped or neglected custom solution can become every bit as restrictive as the commercial software it replaced.
The better answer is often a combination: buy standard capabilities where the process creates no meaningful advantage, connect existing platforms where integration solves the problem, and build where ownership and flexibility have real business value.
To make that decision more concrete, look at the last meaningful change your organisation tried to deliver. How much of the time and budget went into the new capability, and how much went into accommodating the software?
That distinction can tell you far more than a comparison of purchase prices.
Building for the next change
The benefits of custom software development depend on the solution’s ability to evolve. Future-ready software needs to provide a practical, sustainable path for change over anticipating every possible requirement.
BBD’s project approach starts by exploring business priorities, technical constraints and desired outcomes to define the scope, budget and business case. Incremental delivery and continuous feedback allow assumptions to be tested as the solution takes shape, while multidisciplinary software engineering brings architecture, data, experience design, development and testing into the same process.
Reusable accelerators can also provide a head start on common capabilities, reducing repeated engineering effort without sacrificing the flexibility custom development is meant to create.
A platform does not have to fail technically to fall short commercially. It can remain available, stable and perfectly functional while making every improvement slower, more expensive or more dependent on someone else’s priorities.
Before asking what new software would cost, establish what the next change will cost if you keep the software you already have.
Explore custom software development with BBD to identify where greater control could reduce complexity and create room for growth.
