Broken Businesses - how Best of Breed solutions lead to Failed Online Businesses

After having met thousands of entrepreneurs, CTOs, CEOs, marketing and sales directors over the years, not one has felt that they've been making the most of their online business(es). Frequently their companies have multiple websites serving up multiple different content and community streams as well as multiple disparate ecommerce sites selling everything from books to videos, DVDs, clothing, events, networking, memberships and subscriptions. Few feel that they are making a decent return on their investment (if any).

There are numerous reasons for this, some strategic, some staff related. A lot though is down to the limitations of their infrastructure. There are four possible approaches when rolling out an eBusiness: bespoke, open source, best-of-breed solutions or an integrated eBusiness suite.

A term which crops up continuously when companies are launching a new CMS, newsletter, ecommerce, social networking solution is 'best of breed'. The fact is, if you run your online business using a mixture of solutions then you will seriously reduce your revenue generation and online customer service. You will also guarantee less effective SEO (search engine optimisation) and fewer cross-selling and promotions opportunities.

The argument put forward by niche vendors (and this includes the market leaders) is that Best of Breed Solutions (BOBS) will maximize the effectiveness of each aspect of your online business and as a result you will have a higher level of customer engagement and sales. You will be able to use their APIs to pull all the information and services together and create an uber presence, or at least be standards compliant.

I have yet to meet anyone who has gone down the best-of-breed route who actually has an integrated eBusiness. The practical hurdles to achieving integration with so many solutions are immense: how many technologies are being used; what version are they on; are the APIs complementary; what are the release cycles like (some fast others slow); can the applications share user sessions; can they bundle online services, access and media with traditional goods in single transactions; are there embeddable components for elements such as shopping carts?

Open source solutions tend to have all the above problems and have some additions of their own. The fragmented nature of OSS (open source software) means that as more business elements are rolled out online the level of complexity grows exponentially. It is quite easy to manage two or three OSS solutions in parallel for your eBusiness, but in practice often achieving basic cross-selling and promotions can require a dozen additional plugins to the already significant number of solutions being used. OSS also has random elements thrown in, including: product forks (i.e. split into two competing solutions); sudden 'professional' versions and pricing (where things were free before suddenly have a big cost attached); and commercial limitations where you can't use the solution for commercial gain or are forced to share your IP.

Many companies try to grapple with this problem by building their own solutions, typically by cobbling together open source elements with their own proprietary code. For most ventures this is a dead-end which fails to keep up with the market realities. Companies are often worried that they have to own the code (i.e. their own IP) which runs their online business. This makes no sense, and rarely adds value, in fact in most cases it destroys it. The problem is not always apparent with the first generation of their eBusiness presence, but by the time they're working on the second or third it is all too real. The costs mount up, the sites look dated, the customer experience is diminished and less than what it might be.

There is no way that in ten years time anyone will consider building their online businesses on such a dysfunctional setup. In the same way that the office productivity suite superceded the stand-alone spreadsheets and word processors, so will a new generation of eBusiness Suites replace the current hodge-podge of solutions.