When Choosing The Right Technology, Choose Those That Play Well With Others - Forbes

Whether you are undergoing a digital transformation, accommodating new market demands, or just upgrading old technology, you need a sound infrastructure to support your business. The larger the organization, the more complex the decisions become about how to build that infrastructure, especially when it comes to choosing the right vendors.

When choosing technology, the classic problem that every organization faces is whether to go with an end-to-end solution from a single vendor or use a best-of-breed approach. Over the years I have seen a number of companies struggle with the build versus buy and single versus multiple-vendor dilemma. In the age of the cloud, there is another option that seems increasingly attractive -- choosing the solutions that offer the best technology and integration partners for your needs.

Single-Source Solutions Can Lack Flexibility

Remember the adage, “No one ever got fired for buying IBM”? There are still a number of prominent solution vendors that offer a single, comprehensive platform scaled to meet all your technology needs, including Oracle and SAP. At an Oracle conference in 2017, CEO Mark Hurd predicted the demise of best-of-breed solutions. According to Hurd, having a common code base makes it easier for business-critical applications to interoperate, eliminating “the complexity we created in the past.” Does that sound familiar?

Hurd's speech also alluded to the fact that cloud computing had simplified the deployment of single-vendor business software, providing the turnkey hardware and infrastructure to run suites of applications rather than cobbling best-of-breed solutions together yourself.

While I've seen that the cloud has simplified deployment and eliminated much of the infrastructure cost, the risks of going with a single vendor solution remain. Growing your own business depends in part on the strengths and weaknesses of your chosen solution providers. If you standardize on one platform, the tendency is to adapt businesses processes to compensate for platform weaknesses rather than changing the technology to suit your business. If you are using one vendor, for example, and its financial offerings don't meet your unique needs, integrating a best-of-breed alternative financial offering may be prohibitively time-consuming and expensive.

Businesses that choose to ally themselves with the 500-pound gorillas have to follow their lead. That can limit innovation and makes it more difficult to experiment with new ideas and business models. That said, the logical argument for choosing a single-vendor solution is that you have “one throat to choke.” If something goes wrong, you have only one support call to make. Often, with a best-of-breed approach, you tend to have more finger-pointing, which can make it harder to solve the problem. The 500-pound gorilla may also have a large array of technology partners, which could ultimately provide you with more options.

Acquisitions: Round Pegs And Square Holes For Providers

To meet the evolving needs of enterprise customers, solution providers often acquire technology to fill gaps in their offerings, sometimes with less-than-satisfactory results. Expanding your own technology platform via mergers and acquisitions can be messy. Technology mergers may fail for several reasons:

• Culture clash: Bringing two organizations together can result in duplicate resources and a clash of cultures. The time and energy needed to marry two organizations can delay the deployment of acquired technology.

• Technology integration failures: Most technology integrations I've seen have failed on the back end. While the features of the acquired technology may seem ideal to round out an offering, the reality is that implementation takes time, distracts you from maintaining your existing offering, and often ends up as a kludge that eliminates the value of the promised acquisition.

• Acquisitions can sabotage operations: Mergers may cannibalize sales given that you have to integrate the sales teams, including training and territories. This type of integration can cost you sales momentum.

Of course, every tech company needs to stay competitive, and often it’s easier to acquire (buy) the technology you need rather than trying to build it yourself. Consider Salesforce’s purchase of Datorama, which added new capabilities to Salesforce analytics, or IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat to secure its place in the cloud market. (Full disclosure: My company is a Salesforce premier partner.) In cases like these, the acquisition can help the customer and strengthen the vendor’s market position, but there is often little actual technology integration, which can increase the potential for success and rapid return on investment.

Shop For Partnerships As Well As Technology

What I am seeing is that most corporate customers don’t want a single-source solution where they just check the feature boxes. They understand the need for technological agility and the market advantages that strategic, customizable applications can deliver. At the same time, deploying best-of-breed solutions can be expensive and time-consuming to implement and maintain, especially if you have to engage consultants to deliver what you want. More companies seem to be adopting a hybrid approach by standardizing on two or three strategic platforms and filling in any gaps with best-of-breed solutions.

For example, many companies view their ERP and CRM solutions as strategic, so they standardize on proven platforms like Salesforce and NetSuite. While these platforms may check all or most of the feature boxes, they also offer integrations with best-of-breed solution providers. Customers can add customizable solutions to platforms like these that meet their unique requirements because of strong partnerships.

When shopping for technology solutions, you should look beyond the platform and consider the entire ecosystem. Consider your end-to-end needs and then assess your technology choices accordingly. You may have a comprehensive CRM platform that keeps sales, customer service, and accounting in sync, but does it have the analytics capabilities you need, or does the company have partners that can deliver analytics? Consider the technology you need in the context of your growth strategy and think about where you want to be next quarter, next year, and ten years from now. Does the platform have the ability to get you there, and does it have the value-added partner ecosystem you need to help your business grow?

If companies avoid the all-in-one platforms that can limit their growth options, they don't need to rely solely on best-of-breed options either. Instead, they can shop for solution providers that have strong technology partnerships. To stay competitive, you should be able to choose the right partners if you want to dance.

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