Back in 2000, when Uponor Corp., an international supplier of plumbing and heating systems, opted for the Oracle packaged application suite, it did so because it wanted a platform to which it could add modules from that same vendor when and where it made sense. When warehouse management became a core requirement, Uponor figured it was a no-brainer to plug in Oracle Corp.'s WMS product because Uponor was already covered for the license.

Turned out, that decision wasn't so black-and-white. For Uponor's purposes, the Oracle WMS didn't hold its own in a feature-to-feature comparison with best-of-breed applications specializing in that particular area of functionality, according to Chris Moore, vice president of IT for 1.5 billion euro Uponor. Yet, integrating a third-party WMS application with the core Oracle enterprise suite was likely to open a Pandora's box of integration headaches.

In the end, concerns about integration took a back seat to the need for high-end features, such as order consolidation functionality. In 2004, the Finland-based company added HighJump Software's WMS offering to its core Oracle ERP platform.

"As we got a closer look at [Oracle's] WMS, we realized it wasn't going to offer us any of the benefits or automation features we had hoped for," says Moore, who is based in the company's North American headquarters in Minneapolis. "[Oracle WMS] was cheap and easy to enable, but it wasn't going to provide us the necessary benefit from a business perspective."

While Uponor considers itself an Oracle shop, it's not willing to close the door on best-of-breed software. Not every manufacturer feels the same way. With consolidation rampant among best-of-breed software providers, many manufacturers that once were sold on the speed and flexibility of stitching together their preferred mix of point solutions are shifting their attention back to big-company packaged suites. They are doing so, in part, to avoid the risk and instability associated with products from small companies that could be acquired at any moment. Also, companies like the idea of dealing with a single vendor for all their support needs, and they buy into packaged vendors' claims that an all-in-one approach offers lower total cost of ownership (TCO) over the long haul.

Market changes have also worked in favor of packaged suites. The big guns — Oracle, SAP AG, Microsoft Corp., and Infor — have been on a buying spree over the past few years, fleshing out their core enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, initially with broad customer relationship management (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM) capabilities, and eventually, with niche-type functionality traditionally associated with point-solution vendors. Manufacturers' willingness to take a best-of-breed approach also took a hit as many companies found the integration challenges to be far more complex than they had originally bargained for.

"As an IT strategy, best-of-breed has largely gone away," says Jim Shepherd, senior vice president at AMR Research Inc., who estimates that the big, packaged suite vendors currently dominate with more than a 70% share of the market for enterprise software. "People got disillusioned with the actual experience of trying to create fully functioning information systems out of a bunch of parts. It turns out, independent software doesn't always fit neatly together. There are overlaps or gaps in functionality, the [programs] don't play well together, the look-and-feel and navigation is different, and it's very hard on a one-time basis to create an integrated business system."

SOA's Impact

The move to service-oriented architecture (SOA) environments, led by Oracle and SAP, among others, may alter the landscape yet again, however. SOA, with its promise of constructing composite applications and piecing together plug-and-play modules, will likely mitigate some of the integration challenges, swinging the pendulum back again, this time to the point at which best-of-breed is an accepted, if not necessarily preferable, IT strategy. Moreover, manufacturers such as Uponor, with very defined needs in the specialty areas of warehouse management or sales operations and planning, say that after close examination, many of the packaged offerings still fall short on capabilities that add value to the business, keeping the door ajar for point solutions on a case-by-case basis.

"There will always be gaps, and when business models and technology change, independents definitely can respond more quickly than the big-suite vendors can," AMR's Shepherd says. "Also, as broad suites and smaller, niche applications become SOA-based and as SOA skills develop, we'll begin to see CIOs once again view best-of-breed as a strategy for creating more flexible, integrated business suites. I just don't see any signs at the moment that that's happening."