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Vendor Commentary
In recent years there has been a blurring of lines between many of the vendors in the marketplace making it more and more confusing for potential customers to understand which company’s truly offer the right solution for their needs. In many respects, vendors offering like or similar products have sales pitches with a very common look and feel. So how do you really know? That is where an independent consultant with experience dealing with precisely what you are facing can offer significant benefits.
At the heart of Business Intelligence/Decision Support/CRM Analytics is the buy vs. build decision.
In response to customer demand and in their desire to extend their solution offerings, the ERP package vendors have developed strong alternatives to the custom build. However, despite their best efforts to address the issue, in some cases their solutions fail to adequately accommodate the needs and functionality demands of organizations where large volumes of data reside outside of the ERP packages. Being tied to your ERP vendor for your decision support needs may not necessarily be the ideal position to be in, however, it may represent a viable alternative.
Another consideration is the number of consolidations and alliances that are taking place. While part of a natural evolution in any industry, mergers and acquisitions have significant ramifications in the technology market. A key decision point in selecting a vendor partner is their past behaviour with respect to how they extend their product capabilities and functionality — i.e. buy vs. build. Frequently vendors buy competitive or in some cases complementary products in order to extend their product families. While they may have acquired a great addition to their product family (and they’ll be sure to tell you so) that fills a gap in their overall functionality they now likely have an “architectural orphan” and a big decision. Their executive office and technology leadership will need to decide (typically sooner than later) how they plan to integrate this addition into their product suite. They will need to decide whether or not to work around the inconsistencies in the merging of their new found technology architecture or to start to build a new “integrated” solution that in three years time will render their current product suite obsolete. In most cases, their decision will not likely be fully transparent or communicated in the marketplace. There are many examples where this has recently occurred and the customer always ends up facing a difficult decision.
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ActionInfo Consulting |
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Turning Data Into ActionSM |
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Business Intelligence, CRM & Performance Management Specialists |
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