Best for Business or Best of Breed? (page 1 of 2)

The goal is to deploy best practices e-business processes as quickly and effectively as possible while ensuring a quantifiable return on investment (ROI).

The deployment method you choose is critical to your success. Should you adopt the so called 'best of breed' approach or Oracle's approach of reducing complexity by relying on preintegrated, standardized software applications? Below are the differences between the two approaches and the business benefits of the pre-integrated strategy favored by Oracle.

Oracle's ability to save more than $1 billion due to its own transformation to ebusiness has been well chronicled. Other companies can achieve similar success by following Oracle's lead in these key areas:

• Leveraging the internet as a global network and centralizing information, enabling access from anywhere in the world with a standard Web browser

• Adopting new internet-age business practices rather than modifying software to work with outdated business processes

• Relying on integrated, complete software suites that link all company departments into one seamless information flow - from marketing to Web store to telesales to sales to accounting—rather than cobbling together point solutions that were never engineered to work together.

Attempting to manifest the e-business transformation by combining so called best-of-breed applications has obvious inherent flaws: No sooner has the integration project been completed than one of the software vendors releases an update, changing the interface and extending the implementation project. The complications do not end there. Applications designed by different vendors have different interfaces. Even when disparate business applications can be coerced into sharing information, the enterprise lacks a truly integrated e-business environment.

Furthermore, merely linking different applications is not enough. It may enable a company to pass transactions—such as orders and customer information—back and forth, but it does not provide an integrated view of the activities that span both systems. And gaining that view by using pre-integrated software is where companies really begin to enjoy savings.

Oracle's emphasis on implementing standardized, preintegrated, e-business applications runs contrary to the traditional system-integrator methods. Oracle E-Business Suite is integrated out of the box, and Oracle does the work of keeping the applications that way over time. The basic advantages of the Oracle approach are straightforward:

• Begin with a superior database and middleware.
• Simplify IT activities by selecting applications that can be deployed globally
• Deploy applications that are engineered to work seamlessly with one another.
• Avoid customization by using applications that are easily personalized.
• Streamline operations with modern, internet-business-process workflows.
• Adopt industry best practices business flows
• Minimize maintenance issues by working with a single vendor.

A Superior Database and Middleware. When all applications within an enterprise share the same underlying data, the enterprise has a complete view into every transaction—whether it occurs in a back or front-office application. But the single-database architecture requires a superior database, and customers as well as analysts agree that Oracle's database is the # 1 database.
True Global Deployment.