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vendor through the process of acquisition or partnership. This approach attempts to standardize
on a single vendor's application suite and compromise on functionality that is good enough for
minimum requirements but engenders the disadvantageous of vendor lock-in.
Adherents of the single-vendor suite approach are primarily motivated by cost and risk avoidance,
believing that delivered integration and the requirement of a single set of IT skills outweigh trade-
offs in the timing and breadth and depth of the business process functionality. But application suites
turn out to be quite difficult and expensive to implement or upgrade. The engineered complexities
of suites can lessen the benefits of delivered integration in many cases. In a few extreme cases, when
implementation and upgrades are not planned properly or when companies lack adequately trained
resources in vendor-specific IT skills, such projects can potentially destabilize a company.
Finally, suite vendors are even more challenged while addressing the requirements of inter- or
cross customer-centric enterprise collaborative activities that are becoming pervasive with the
advent of the Internet. Getting a customer-centric enterprise to standardize on a single vendor's
application suite is fairly difficult, but to get an entire value chain to adopt and standardize on a
proprietary set of applications and interfaces is highly impossible.
4.5.1.2 Integrated Best-in-Class Applications
An alternative approach to suites is an interfaced best-in-class or best-of-breed solution—an
approach whereby an enterprise selects from multiple vendors a set of applications that must be
interfaced to work together, either by the enterprise, one of the selected vendors, or a third-party
integrator. Customer-centric enterprises select the applications because they best meet the particu-
lar needs. Such process-specific applications generally lead in the areas of time to market and the
breadth and depth of functionality—especially for industry-specific processes. The benefits of this
approach are
◾
Streamlining operating cycles on high-volume business processes
◾
Reducing processing and inventory costs
◾
Improving compliance with contracts
◾
Enhancing collaboration while strengthening long-term relationships with strategic trading
partners
The downside of this approach is the higher efforts and costs of integration. The challenge with
this approach is that, in some cases, the enterprise fails to complete the necessary interfaces
to get the individual applications working together; consequently, the applications remain
stovepipes.
Thus, this approach attempts to deploy state-of-the-art application functionality from multiple
vendors at markedly increased cost of integration. A variation on this theme, called
the Best of
cluster
, is similar to best of class, except that instead of individual applications, suites or bundles
are interfaced.
4.5.1.2.1 Component-Based Architectures
A component-based architecture can eliminate the customary trade-off between best-practice
functionality and large integration and ongoing support costs. A standards-based architecture
provides a unified framework on which componentized applications from multiple vendors can be
easily and cost-effectively
