Almost ten years ago, the main players in the ERP market (Oracle,JD Edwards and SAP) found themselves under attack from a number young and dynamic companies that have introduced a new wave applications like online procurement, online market places and believe it or not customer relationship management, areas where traditional ERP vendors were not particularly strong.

With streamlined processes, friendly user interfaces and energetic sales tactics, companies like Ariba, CommerceOne, i2 and Siebel did capture the imagination of business and IT professionals alike. Many CIOs were forced by their business users (or just felt it was cool) to adopt a best-of-breed business applications strategy (or let us just call it approach). It was not so uncommon during the dot com era to hear CIOs talking about projects to integrate Oracle Financials, with Siebel CRM, PeopleSoft HR and Ariba procurement.

What made it even worse, is that many major consulting and integration firms used PowerPoint to demonstrate their capabilities in that space. After all it takes only a few minutes to create an integrated IT architecture on slides using PowerPoint. Of course sending you an army of consultants armed with glue guns followed by a fat bill is never such a bad idea!

ERP vendors who could not compete on a feature by feature basis with the new comers responded first by adding the word ‘suite’ to their own product names while referring to the new comers as ‘point solutions’ vendors, secondly by campaigning about the benefits of pre integrated software and thirdly by enhancing the functionality of those ‘suites’ .

The plan worked! A large percentage of those major integration projects failed, most of the point solution vendors are no longerpart of main stream IT today and with time I guess most CIOs have accepted the fact that you cannot run a business on many bits and pieces of applications that were not designed to work together In the mean time consulting firms found it difficult to achieve on the ground what they created in PowerPoint, and traditional ERP vendors prevailed after enhancing their products.

Over time, however, a business outgrows the functionality originally selected and implemented and is now forced to make a decision of whether it wants to keep its existing software and add a bolt-on solution to what it already has or start over and go with a broader suite. For example existing ERP customers are now looking at new areas like business intelligence, transportation management and performance management, area where their ERP vendors may or maynot have a leadership position and so customers find themselves debating the suite versus best of breed again.

Some of us watched the same story repeat in the middleware space, and once again it was a happy ending for the suite proponents. Once again, middleware customers are now looking at new areas like social networking in the enterprise and are wondering whether to settle for whatever their vendor offers or bolt on a third party solution.

In conclusion, I guess it would be reasonable to say that a good integrated suite is in most cases the best place to start and that bolting on a specialized solution or two would work if your suite vendor is far behind the curve.

Ayman Abouseif

www.ontrackarabia.com