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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.7 Avoiding Vendor Lock-In Suites can often leave the buyer feeling trapped, for a number of reasons. First, in depending so much on a single technology vendor for so many different business applications, buyers lose leverage in price negotiations with the suite vendor. Betting on a vendor's SaaS suite forces the CFO to make significant financial and resource investments to gain value from the software functionalities. The greater the investment a CFO makes in configuring a SaaS suite to meet their specific needs, the more trapped you become. Ultimately, the CFO puts their ability to perform their day-to-day responsibilities at risk by being too dependent on a SaaS suite vendor that can't deliver user-friendly solutions and keep pace with customer needs in financial management. Summary & Conclusions The choice between best-of-breed software solutions and software suites has been hotly debated for decades. A best-of-breed approach allows you to choose the best solution for each part of your organization at each stage in your growth. As your business grows and changes over time, a best-of-breed approach gives you the freedom to select the right solution to meet your evolving needs. While the logic of software suites seems straightforward, the realities of overcoming the complexities and limitations that come with suites can far outweigh their potential value. A new generation of robust APIs is making it easier to tie together multiple best-of-breed SaaS solutions to match the multidimensional functionality promised by SaaS suite vendors. Adopting this 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 now and over time. Given these advantages, it is not surprising that a growing number of successful CFOs are choosing best-of-breed SaaS solutions to meet their escalating business and technology needs. About THINKstrategies, Inc. THINKstrategies, Inc. is the only strategic consulting services company focused entirely on helping its clients capitalize on the unprecedented business opportunities created by the technology industry shift from a product-centric to a services-driven orientation and an "on-demand" delivery model, such as Cloud Computing, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Managed Services. THINKstrategies' mission is to help our clients re-THINK their corporate strategies, refocus their resources and re-align their operations to achieve their business objectives. THINKstrategies helps enterprise decision-makers with their sourcing strategies, IT solutions providers with their marketing strategies, and VCs with their investment strategies. For more information regarding our unique capabilities, visit www.thinkstrategies.com, or contact us at info@thinkstrategies.com.