The All-Inclusive Trap: Why Your Business Should Think Twice about One-Stop Software

When I travel, I’m not really an all-inclusive resort kind of person. I understand the allure - It’s nice to have everything taken care of and just kick back with a margarita. But it’s never quite that easy, is it? Sometimes you’re stuck with food you don’t like or the atmosphere feels canned or you just want to be able to make your own choices.

And that - by way of analogy - is exactly how I feel about enterprise software. We’re living in an era when all-inclusive business software is rearing its head again. Back in the day, these kind of comprehensive suites were de rigueur, designed to handle everything from marketing to sales and customer service, all in one package. They were billed as seamless, end-to-end solutions for bringing diverse business function online and into the digital age.

The reality, of course, was often quite different. A suite that was great at handling customer relations management might be a stinker when it came to marketing. One might excel at e-commerce but be a dog when it came to sales. The problem was you were locked into the whole shabang. These end-to-end solutions also tended to be enormously complex. Implementation was costly, training was time-consuming and switching to a different vendor was a nightmare. Once a business locked into a particular suite, they were essentially stuck with it.

Then along came the cloud in the late ‘90s, which helped to change everything. The convenience of the cloud - no need for servers, or hardware or mega-suites - gave companies newfound freedom to cherry-pick so called “best-of-breed” software for particular jobs. So the sales team could evaluate and sign up for exactly the SaaS (software-as-a-service) tools it needed, as could the customer service team, the marketing team and so on.

The revenge of monster suites

Over the past several years, however, an arms race has quietly accelerated among software’s biggest vendors. Their aim: to bring the end-to-end software model to the cloud. These companies are offering clients ever more extensive suites of products. Even Salesforce, for example, once the poster child for focused, best-of-breed solutions, has expanded from its initial sales cloud to offer a service cloud and a marketing cloud, each packed with a full suite of associated products. To be clear, these new suites aren’t closed in the old-fashioned sense - They do integrate with outside applications (thousands, in fact, in the case of Salesforce). But at their core is a fixed set of components. Venturing outside - even for superior software - often becomes a huge headache.

The result is a classic case of software history repeating. The new wave of “all-inclusive” clouds come with many of the very same caveats as old-fashioned, end-to-end suites. Some of the native products will be great, others will inevitably leave something to be desired. But, to one degree or another, you’re locked into the core offerings. This inconvenience is compounded by the fact that - by design - these core products generally don’t play well with outside programs, especially competing ones. (This is akin to Apple’s “walled garden” approach, i.e. designing devices and apps that don’t integrate with third-party products.) So if your marketing team has a favorite program or your sales team has come to love a particular piece of software, they may well be out of luck, depending on the suite you choose. In other words - to continue my travel analogy - many big vendors today want you booked at their all-inclusive software resort, whether you like it or not.

In praise of open ecosystems

But there is hope. Just as big software vendors are consolidating offerings into monster suites, there is a counterpush among independent vendors committed to a very different idea: preserving an open ecosystem. These companies design software that’s compatible with as wide a range of applications as possible. Their offerings are built to plug-and-play with third-party products and apps and exchange data freely. They boast open APIs so collaborators and even competitors can build off of their platform, adding integrations and specialized tools.

The result is that clients aren’t locked into a single, defined suite of services; instead, they can incorporate the tools they are already using and familiar with or whatever promising new tools come on the market. The CMO can choose the specific, best-of-breed applications that best serve his team’s needs and the VP of sales can choose the applications that best serve her team’s needs. When built right, these tools are mutually compatible, sharing data and functionality through smart integrations.

This is the approach, for example, that I’ve built my company around. Hootsuite is the core of an ecosystem that integrates with hundreds of best-of-breed marketing, sales, social media and customer service apps, from marketing automation tools like Marketo to customer experience apps like Zendesk, sales tools like SugarCRM, social networks like YouTube and Instagram, and more. The ecosystem is exhaustive, not exclusive: If there’s a great tool out there, we find a way to work with it.

This idea of open exchange transcends business software - It’s the essence of the digital era. The Internet flourished precisely because its working parts were compatible with one another and information flowed freely through open, standard protocol. The growth of walled gardens - proprietary silos of information, sealed off inside apps, social networks and devices - has of late challenged that paradigm. In one respect, the new wave of proprietary monster suites from big software represents a similar kind of threat.

But there is a safety valve. The very transformations that Salesforce and other cloud giants ushered in - low-cost, subscription software, streamed over the Internet - ensure that their quest for enterprise software domination will run into some serious hurdles. These days, the best solutions for specific office needs are literally a click away. Cloud-based, SaaS products - for customer support or sales or marketing or even social media - are easy to sign up for and try out. Superior tools tend to gain a following organically, often bypassing the IT department entirely. In democratic fashion, the best rise to the top. In this climate, the idea of companies locking themselves into high-priced, limiting suites of software seems quaint and a bit backward. After all, who wants to be stuck in some cookie-cutter all-inclusive when there’s a whole world out there to explore?

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Photo credit: Sarah Marchildon | Flickr