Hinzugefügt: 24 May 2023
In the modern software landscape, best-of-breed contrasts with the all-in-one solution. If a company opts for the former, it benefits from the flexibility and tailored efficiency. CIOs and IT managers, on the other hand, face the challenge of integrating them smoothly. Cloud integration platforms are important here, but they also want to be selected and implemented sensibly. A roadmap for medium-sized companies and hidden champions.
Best-of-Breed: Advantages and Challenges
The best-of-breed strategy enables companies to combine specialized solutions and meet individual requirements. Unlike the all-in-one solution, it is flexible and adaptable to manage change quickly and drive innovation. A tailored software landscape improves efficiency by giving employees access to specialized tools. In this way, companies increase their competitiveness and adapt to the changing business environment.
Implementing such a best-of-breed strategy is not without challenges; after all, only with connections between these solutions can one truly speak of a functioning software landscape.
Selecting the right applications, integrating the various solutions, and supporting and maintaining the system landscape are complex tasks that involve important corporate IT resources. A comprehensive strategy with constant process optimization, training of employees and, of course, careful evaluation of the required software should be standard here in order to build up and secure a solid software landscape. On the IT side, the data integration already mentioned plays the main role.
These challenges in the best-of-breed strategy are frequently addressed in the industry, for example by Rob Tarkoff from Oracle: "Marketers don't need more standalone tools, they need a platform". Sounds like "away from all-in-one", but we translate it here as: "towards the platform".
Cloud-Integration as Key Factor
Indeed, a suitable cloud integration platform enables precisely such a functioning integration and can therefore be seen as a key factor for best-of-breed. It enables the seamless connection of different cloud solutions and provides the necessary tools to configure, control and monitor the integration processes. The platform should provide robust interfaces, connectors and data mapping capabilities and be scalable and flexible.
Implementing such a platform towards a successful best-of-breed strategy requires several steps for enterprises to achieve the goal of an efficient software landscape. The following roadmap provides an overview and timeline of these steps in the first six months. It is important to note that cloud integration is an iterative process - success is possible in a short time, but in the long term, optimization must be repeated.
Roadmap towards effective Cloud-Integration
Month 1-2: Start of the first Integration
- Analyze the top three business objectives related to integration and automation.
- Evaluation of a suitable cloud integration platform: comparison of at least two solutions, evaluation, justified selection.
- Implementation of the first integration: meaningful integration as a small test balloon.
Monat 3-4: Evaluation and Extension
- Daily review of the integration and its performance.
- Collect feedback from users.
- Continuous optimization in terms of efficiency, safety and user experience.
- Scale integration piecewise: implement more integrations and add features.
Month 5-6 and after: Iteration and Scaling
- Employee training: Benefits of best-of-breed, cloud integration and automation. Sharing use cases and successes of initial integrations.
- Step-by-step expansion: integration by integration, system by system.
- Monthly: new test integrations.
- Weekly: collect user feedback.
- Daily: monitoring of the performance of the integrations.
With a phased approach to integrations, not only can initial successes be achieved quickly, but it also allows the software landscape and cloud integration to be repeatedly expanded and adapted over time. This iterative approach enables flexible scaling and continuous optimization to meet the individual requirements of your business and the efficient software landscape to match.