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White Paper The Best-of-Breed Advantage for Financial Management: Get the Full Benefit of the Cloud © THINKstrategies, Inc., 2013 www.thinkstrategies.com p.6 Performance Risk Even if the deployment process doesn't fail entirely, your problems do not go away. SaaS suite vendors may be able to provide basic functional capabilities across a wide range of areas, but they can't deliver deep functionality and the latest innovations in specific areas. This means the entire organization, including the CFO and the finance team, must accept something less than the best functionality available and will not be able to take advantage of the latest innovations in each application in the future. Adopting a suite means that each part of the organization will have to compromise and use the officially-sanctioned solution offered as part of the suite – the accountant can't opt out of using the suite GL for instance. Limiting choice and providing insufficient tools that lack functional depth leads to employee dissatisfaction and subpar results. Accountants seeking better functionality will create a workaround to get their job done – using spreadsheets and unsanctioned software – and use the functionally-limited accounting system as little as possible. This means you're getting a lower return-on-investment (ROI) from your SaaS suite. Long-Term Risk A CFO has to be fully focused on maintaining tight control over their financial management requirements over time. It's essential that systems keep pace with evolving process requirements dictated by changes or growth in the business. Yet, only a limited portion of a SaaS suite vendor's R&D effort is focused on their financial management capabilities when they are trying to satisfy a broad set of operational requirements. A suite vendor has to spread their R&D effort among all the modules of their suite. As a result, there's no guarantee that the finance features of the suite will be enhanced on an ongoing basis to keep pace with the innovations being generated by best-of- breed SaaS vendors. In fact, a feature gap you experience today will likely grow wider over time without dedicated improvement in the areas of the suite that you need the most – finance and accounting. These functional gaps create long-term risks if the vendor isn't committed to making a significant investment in the financial management aspects of their suite over the long haul. Best-of-breed solution reduce the risk of functional gaps because the vendor is in business to deliver only a finance accounting solution and more likely to make substantial improvements with every release. Additional long-term risks come from the nature of the suite architecture itself. To make a suite work efficiently, the modules of the suite need to share the same technical infrastructure (database schema, objects, reporting infrastructure). Advances in the suite's features and functionality are dependent on updates and improvements to the shared infrastructure. Therefore, even if a finance module gets updated features, those features are not delivered until the shared resources are updated – a process which can be lengthy because the shared infrastructure changes need to be validated to work with all modules in a suite, not just the accounting or finance solution. This process can further delay the delivery of essential new features for the finance organization. Ultimately, the lack of total alignment between a suite vendor's R&D priorities and the needs of a finance organization creates a long-term risk that the technology can't keep pace with business requirements.

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