Best of Breed Versus a Product Suite - One Version of the Truth

In any environment the customer has a range of choices when it comes to software and the cloud is no exception.

But what we’re finding as we perform IT assessments on behalf of companies, is that often they’ve opted for a myriad of “best in class” software alternatives, and consequently find themselves faced with the difficult dilemma of how to integrate these disparate products.

For example, a company may be using QuickBooks in their back office for financials, Salesforce.com as a CRM solution, along with a custom built ecommerce platform for their website and so on.

This means three different technologies, three different code bases, and three different data sources and this leads to a lot of confusion when it comes to deciphering How reliable the information is when it comes to making critical business decisions.

Because there are three different versions of the truth, if you will.

And integrating these disparate products is not a single, one time event either, but rather something that has to be revisited with each and every change that is introduced to each of these products.

These products weren’t designed to produce a common result so generating reports and getting visibility to actionable information is cumbersome and invariably requires custom work and additional expense.

It’s not unusual for companies to struggle over whose version of the truth should be adopted.

Is it the Sales VP whose relying on the data and reports produced from Salesforce.com, or is it the controller whose source is QuickBooks? And what about tracking the orders that came in from over the Web? Where is that information held?

The clear advantage of a product suite, like NetSuite is that it contains all of these modules (along with others) already fully integrated and it’s designed to produce a common result.

There is just one source of the data which means customer information, product information and vendor information exist in one place only.

And best of all, when the software publisher in the cloud performs product upgrades and releases new versions of the software, all related modules are elevated simultaneously and the solution components remain in lockstep with one another.

Are you interested in getting to just one version of the truth?

Contact us as TrueCloud. We can help!


Dave Rice CEO, TrueCloud

www.truecloud.com