Top 4 Considerations for your Organization
When considering a software solution, here are 4 things you should consider when trying to choose between an Enterprise versus a “Purpose-Built” Solution. A purpose-built solution is a best-of-breed application designed for a specific process and/or task. It is built to do one thing very well. On the other hand, enterprise solutions (i.e. Oracle Cloud) integrate multiple facets of a company’s business through the interchange of information from multiple business process areas and related databases.
1. Purpose-built solutions go against the trend – That is to say, there was a time when organizations were purchasing purpose-built solutions for their operations. This trend has been costly to organizations due to licensing, less intra-app integration, maintenance, and support. Over the course of the last few years, Elire has been assisting organizations to remove these purpose-built solutions to consolidate applications to a single solution.
- Increasing applications means increasing integrations. New Cloud applications are better integrated from a data and process perspective.
- The approach to how data is structured differs. Different applications means different data structures. Keeping data in-sync across platforms is time-consuming, messy, and prone to errors. Oracle’s Trading community model allows for seamless integration of data across your organization’s entire enterprise.
2. Oracle is investing billions in research and development adding integration tools (for when integrations are unavoidable), and community functionality to its roadmap, eliminating the need for purpose-built applications in 5 years.
- Purpose-built applications are trendy. They tend to have a 5-7 year lifecycle and then fade, either unable to keep up with technology landscape changes, support, or acquisition from a larger competitor.
3. Consider costs. Organizations are looking to minimize IT spend. Multiple applications means dedicating multiple resources to support the different platforms, additional training, or external support contracts to maintain business needs.
- Any functionality needs that are “gained” with a 3rd party application are lost in costs to maintain the integrations and in disconnected data
4. Enterprise solutions offer flexibility in “editing” transactions. It is hard enough to get transactions corrected when they cross functional areas, let alone multiple solutions. The goal is to keep the entire transaction lifecycle in a single-sourced solution for processing.
Overall, deploying ANY purpose-built solution will drive costs up and any additional functionality gained will be more than offset by the technical/functional costs and overall limitations at a high level.
Move forwards, not backwards with an Enterprise Solution. For more information on how an enterprise solution can help your organization, check out the Cloud Services area of our website and download our informational one sheets.
