Steve Baxter, Enterprise Marketing Manager for Zoho UK, explains why looking for Best-of-Breed is a terrible way to buy business software.
We all want the absolute best, don't we? At work. At home. In clothes. In food. In friends. In everything. What idiot would suggest otherwise? Well, this idiot.
Here's the problem when best-of-breed is applied to software: best-of-breed software is the best at what it does. App X is the best email system. App Y is the best CRM system. App Z is the best project management system.
That's a problem because your business doesn't just need an email system or a CRM system or a project management system. It needs all of them. If you use App X, Y and Z, some poor so-and-so is going to get the thankless task of making these apps talk to each other.
In big enterprises, that's a problem. A 2022 Forrester report said that 75% respondents saw integrating their systems as their biggest challenge. That's enterprise organisations, remember - the corporate leviathans with big IT departments and big budgets. What about the poor SME sector that has neither?
For SMEs, this becomes more of a nightmare than a mere "problem". SMEs have small IT departments or an IT contractor with limited time. Their job is to provide application support, not to develop complex new apps or decipher the data schemas that App X is built on. They can do it for you but then all the other IT priorities get less attention than last year's Christmas cards.
Even though I'm a marketer, I'm also a bit of a tech nerd. I once spent days - maybe weeks - writing Visual Basic routines to transfer data from an ERP system to an email marketing system. Even when I got it working, I was the only one who could use it. And then the data format changed and I had to dive back into the code to fix it.
That's life when you have to build your own integrations between apps. Is that right for your business? Is that what you want your staff to be doing? No! If they're Marketing, you want them to build your brand or generate leads. If they're IT, you want them to stop Russian hackers pillaging your bank accounts. If they're Operations, you want them to make something you can sell.
Best-in-Bundles beats Best-of-Breed
This is why best-in-bundles is a better idea than best-of-breed. Buy apps in bundles, or "platforms" if you like playing a bit of buzzword bingo.
The beauty of bundles is that all the apps are built to talk to each other from Day One. You don't have to build the integration between them because it's already there. The most you'll have to do is setup the rules: send valuable leads to Claire The Closer; send customer complaints to Dave The Drool.
Once you adopt a best-in-bundles approach, your business shows immediate improvements. Your sales team and customer service desk work within the same system. So does your marketing team. And your operations team. And your finance team. And your HR team.
Your customers start seeing you as one company instead of several disconnected and disjointed departments. You start being able to complete processes twice as fast. You start noticing how reliable your operations have become because activities can be automated across departments rather than sending emails between them.
It will be tempting for best-of-breed vendors to say that adopting a best-in-bundles approach means settling for second-rate software. Far from it. As artificial intelligence and analysis becomes more important, it becomes more critical than ever that apps use centralised data. And that means using integrated apps, not independent ones.
Not all bundles are equal
You know what I said earlier about bundles being designed to integrate from Day One? I was stretching the truth so far even Trump would blush. You've probably seen a lot of big name software vendors offering application bundles. The marketing suggests they all come from the same company. Not always.
It's more usual for a company to develop a couple of core apps and buy the others in. Commercially, it makes some sense. Technically, ouch. The new owner has to try to get its existing apps to talk to its new acquisition. They're heading into Frankenstein territory - not quite as bad as splicing a dog's paw onto a rat's leg but, well, you get the picture.
And then they have to get the development teams working together. Do the cultures match? Do they even speak the same language? Or do they have a match made in hell like Elon Musk and Twitter?
Companies that buy complementary apps instead of developing them internally are scratching the short-term itch that says they've got to have an app ready in 6 months. That means they've got to buy whatever's available because they can't develop a new app in that time. Believe me, Zoho have been in the software business since 1996 so we know how long it takes to develop apps.
These Frankenstein bundles are neither best-of-breed nor best-in-bundles. They're best-we-could get-at-the-time.
At Zoho, we have the luxury of speaking from a very comfortable position. We can and do develop apps from scratch in our own time. We don't have any shareholders pushing us to meet impossible deadlines. We develop apps to be part of a bundle from inception. We grow them like new branches on a thriving tree, rather than as a Frankenstein graft onto a moribund carcass.
Not every Zoho app is integrated with every other app. They don't need to be. It's hard to think of a circumstance when your social media marketing system needs to link to your accounts software. But the integrations exist where they make sense. And they exist out of the box. And the apps were all built by Zoho with the intention to integrate with other Zoho apps from Day One.
The final call for best-of-breed
Here's one final thought on best-of-breed: it's not the same as best-for-you. If you think about it, best-of-breed is as ridiculous a concept as lucky dip. It supposes that every business needs the same thing. It suggests that a good accounts system for Accenture is also a good accounts system for Walsall Windows.
That's obvious tosh.
If there's one thing that all businesses need - from the Accentures of this world to the Walsall Windows - it's more time. If you want more time, remove the complications that waste it faster than Facebook's Suggested Feeds.
Simple is beautiful. When it comes to software, simplicity comes from best-in-bundles.