“Whether you are undergoing a digital transformation, accommodating new market demands, or just upgrading old technology, you need a sound infrastructure to support your business. The larger the organization, the more complex the decisions become about how to build that infrastructure, especially when it comes to choosing the right vendors.”
Gotransverse CEO James Messer was recently featured in Forbes, highlighting the challenges and best practices for businesses looking to build the technology systems foundation to support their digital transformations.
The key, he says, is finding technologies that play well with others.
Businesses looking for new software solutions are choosing between building versus buying, adopting end-to-end solutions or piecing together ecosystems of offerings from “best-of-breed” vendors. But today, in what he refers to as “the age of the cloud,” Messer says there’s a better option: “choosing the solutions that offer the best technology and integration partners for your needs.
Single-source, end-to-end solutions can be inflexible, he says, limiting business’ capabilities to their single service provider’s way of doing things and requiring them to adjust their own systems and processes to match the vendor’s, rather than finding a vendor that can support existing initiatives. “Businesses that choose to ally themselves with the 500-pound gorillas have to follow their lead,” says Messer. “That can limit innovation and makes it more difficult to experiment with new ideas and business models.” Similarly, best-of-breed solutions are often difficult to customize as much as a business might prefer, and they’re often costly and time-consuming to implement and maintain, requiring consultants to fully integrate and set up.
What Messer sees more companies doing instead is adopting a hybrid approach, standardizing on two or three strategic platforms with robust integration offerings and then filling in gaps with carefully chosen best-of-breed vendor partners.
“For example, many companies view their ERP and CRM solutions as strategic, so they standardize on proven platforms like Salesforce and Workday. While these platforms may check all or most of the feature boxes, they also offer integrations with best-of-breed solution providers. Customers can add customizable solutions to platforms like these that meet their unique requirements because of strong partnerships.”
Read Messer’s full article in Forbes.
This approach gives businesses the most flexibility and control, allowing them to assess their end-to-end needs and making technology choices that meet those needs exactly, adding additional features and capabilities to help them achieve their goals in the short and long term.
The key in identifying these vendor partners, of course, is ensuring they have the integration capabilities they need to play well with others — both existing systems and others a business may implement down the line. All the high-end platforms in the world won’t make a bit of difference (except maybe to clog the gears) if they don’t work together seamlessly.
After all, If your combination of disparate systems doesn’t integrate seamlessly with one another,” says Gotransverse VP of Product Management Doug Johnson in a recent blog post, “you’ll be wasting a bunch of time and effort, reducing the value you get from each product. Soon enough, your team will be spending more time juggling platforms than doing their jobs.”
At Gotransverse, we pride ourselves on our intelligent billing platform’s capability to plug into existing systems through a robust collection of integrations, APIs, microservices, and connectors that ensure your front office and back office are working seamlessly together, leading to heightened accuracy, faster processes and happier customers.
Meet some of our integration partners here.
Our strong technology partnerships and our commitment to helping clients build the systems foundation that solves their unique business challenges and empowers growth makes Gotransverse more than a vendor — we consider ourselves to be our clients’ trusted technology partners, as well.
If your organization is ready to complete your tech ecosystem and enhance your billing processes, we invite you to learn more out more about Gotransverse’s platform and all the ways it plays well with others. Take a tour of the Gotransverse platform today, and call us to schedule your complimentary, personalized demo.