Why Best-of-Breed vs. Best-of-Suite Can be a False Choice?

Having spent most of my career in business software, I’ve found the discussion between Best-of-Breed vs. Best-of-Suite to be lacking some nuance - is it always one way or the other? The reality is companies are always selecting shades of both, depending on the phase of the company, the specific business processes they’re addressing, and the breadth and depth of solutions in the market.

Let’s start by explaining these terms. 

Best-of-Breed

A product that’s considered the top performer in a specific function or category (e.g., subscription billing, revenue recognition, General Ledger, cloud costs etc).

Best-of-Suite

A unified platform that covers a broad range of functions across a business (e.g., ERP covering finance, billing, revenue recognition, cloud costs, and people costs).

Why Companies Choose Best-of-Breed

Companies often choose Best-of-Breed solutions because they prioritize depth, specialization, and immediate functional value in a specific area. But they don’t choose them without considering their Best-of-Suite options. Often the selection of Best-of-Breed solutions is justified when the suites don’t have the depth of functionality in a core area of importance to the company’s top-line or bottom-line. Take subscription and consumption billing for example; being able to flexibly change pricing and packaging based on current market conditions is essential to running a company; legacy ERP has not done a good job of accommodating newer business models natively, and hence customers often choose a Best-of-Breed solution in this area; the same thing be said of Cloud Costs as managing gross margin and unit economics is crucial to the long-term success of a business. Many times, high-value Best-of-Breed solutions end up being industry and/or business model specific, as they are specific to the needs of how a company fundamentally operates its business; if not managed properly it can mean the success or failure of the company. 

By contrast, let’s take a look at another business process - the management of employee spending via credit cards. While it’s important for businesses to balance control over employee spending with the freedom to allow employees to do their jobs effectively, this overall expense does not fundamentally guide the success or failure of most businesses today. As a result, many reasonable options are available, and customers can make a vendor selection based on price, business practices and ease-of-use.       

Why Companies Choose Best-of-Suite

Companies often choose Best-of-Suite solutions to prioritize simplicity, consistency, and integration across their enterprise. Best-of-Suite solutions, if deployed properly, reduce data siloes and the costs needed to keep the integrated solutions running with clean data. When mission critical changes such as product and pricing changes and acquisitions are warranted, Best-of-Suite solutions enable quick adaptation through these changes through end-to-end business processes that integrated point solutions simply cannot match. In the AI era, having a strong foundation of clean and accurate data is paramount, as it can form the foundation on top of which to perform analysis, and extend business processes quickly without compromising integrity. 

Can you be both Best-of-Breed and Best-of-Suite?

At Everest, in the AI era, we believe it’s possible to be both Best-of-Breed and Best-of-Suite. We believe that by providing the mission critical Best-of-Breed foundation (subscription and consumption billing, revenue recognition, cloud costs), when combined with an Internationalized GL, people and vendor costs, provides companies the right pre-integrated tools with which to launch product and pricing changes quickly, integration acquisitions faster, while reducing data siloes and total cost of ownership. With native AI built into our foundation, business users, without unnecessary dependence on technical resources, can extend and test business processes on their own, using our patented Live SandboxTM technology. 

But what if a company has already invested in a Best-of-Breed solution that is working for them, for example a custom billing solution around a payment processor like Stripe or a spend management solution focused on credit card spend and vendor payments. We flexibly meet these customers where they are and deploy our modular solution integrated into their existing environment. For some customers, this means starting their Everest journey with an end-to-end ERP solution; for others it means deploying specific modules, for instance the GL, Order-to-Cash, Cloud Costs or Revenue Recognition. What’s more - regardless of the starting point, we provide the integration tools inside our platform - to take ownership of the data from third-party systems by transforming operational data into financially rigorous data that can drive management and investor decisions, while meeting the bar for regulatory compliance. 

The key recommendation from our point of view is to not to overindex on whether you’re choosing a Best-of-Breed or Best-of-Suite strategy - this strategy in reality is nuanced and will evolve over time. Instead, depending on the details of your business and where it’s headed, it’s worth examining what business processes are worth unifying under one solution vs. those that can be managed separately. And regardless, it’s worth focusing on which providers represent the right trusted partners and software platforms for your journey.