White Papers

White Paper The Best-of-Breed Advantage for Financial Management: Get the Full Benefit of the Cloud © THINKstrategies, Inc., 2013 www.thinkstrategies.com p.2 Executive Summary One of the fundamental questions facing CFOs in small and medium-sized organizations is whether to select a 'best-of-breed' solution or a software suite as they look to improve the technology foundation for their processes. Determining the tradeoffs associated with these two options has never been more critical because of today's increasingly challenging business environment, and the need for organizations to take advantage of more user-friendly applications that also offer unprecedented functionality. A new generation of innovative Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications with more robust APIs is making it easier to tie together multiple best-of-breed SaaS solutions to match the broad functionality promised by suites delivered by independent software vendors (ISVs) of the past and current-day SaaS vendors. Adopting a best-of-breed approach not only gives a CFO access to deeper functional capabilities, it enables the CFO to rollout the functionality more quickly at a lower cost with less risk. Given these advantages, it is not surprising that the number of successful CFOs choosing best-of- breed SaaS solutions to meet their escalating business needs is accelerating. Introduction Businesses of all sizes, across nearly every industry are facing unprecedented challenges which are forcing them to fundamentally change the way they operate. These challenges include: Escalating competition as globalization, ecommerce and Cloud-based services are lowering the barriers to entry and making it easier for new competitors to win a share of the market. Rising customer expectations and declining customer loyalties because of a growing number of product choices with more attractive pricing models, such as subscription-based offerings in the cloud. Changing organizational needs as businesses become more global and their employees become more dispersed and reliant on remote access corporate resources in the cloud. As a result of these challenges, organizations of all sizes must adopt more robust financial management systems that can enable them to better monitor their performance on an ongoing basis so they can react more quickly to rapidly changing market dynamics. Fortunately, the new generation of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications delivered via the cloud is enabling a growing number of businesses of all sizes to respond to these challenges. The appeal of these SaaS solutions is that they are more user-friendly, flexible and cost-effective than their legacy, on-premises predecessors. These powerful SaaS alternatives allow organizations to be more agile and responsive to their evolving business requirements. Some SaaS vendors offer their solutions to these business challenges in the form of software suites which promise to make it easier to adopt a broad set of functional capabilities in a single package. However, these suites often fail to deliver on this promise because each part of the organization may not get the best tool for its specific needs, and rolling out a full suite often entails greater deployment challenges. These issues defeat the fundamental reasons for adopting SaaS applications – quicker deployment, increased productivity, and accelerated time to value.

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