BI Solutions Strategy: Business Suite or Best-of-Breed?
Best-of-breed tools should be limited to only a few that may provide strategic advantage while using an integrated platform for most business requirements.
- By Alex Chaves-Sanz, Ihsan Al-Awamy
- June 20, 2008
A best-of-breed approach to deploying business intelligence (BI) capabilities in today’s enterprise provides the opportunity to exploit tools and applications to support highly differentiated business processes through advanced and industry-specific functionality. This advantage comes at the price of increased total cost of ownership (TCO) over time for maintenance and support when compared with a single-vendor platform in which there are normally no point-to-point interfaces to maintain. Best-of-breed tools should be limited to only a few that may provide strategic advantage while using an integrated platform for most business requirements.
The greatest value of BI comes from being increasingly embedded within the business processes themselves. Integrated platforms can provide BI capabilities throughout a company’s enterprise applications, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM), as well as within a data warehouse, thereby making the use of BI more widespread and pervasive. As the BI market consolidates, many innovative best-of-breed vendors will be acquired by large business suite players for their unique capabilities, making their competitive stability a major consideration.
This article originally appeared in the issue of TDWI.