Beware the all-in-one promise. Your brand needs the best.

When it comes to customer experience, monolithic systems leave you and your brand at a strategic dead-end. Here is the case for open, best-of-breed platforms — and why your customer experience needs more than vendor-dictated conformity.

One of the most persistent pipe dreams in modern business is this:

"If only we had one integrated IT solution that does everything, life would be easy."

I recently met with two senior executives of a growing $10B multi-brand company. They drive their business with more than 500 separate websites and online stores using IBM WebSphere Commerce and, like many others, are struggling with the lack of sophisticated content & experience management functionality. After screening a long list of CMS solutions, it came down to Adobe or CoreMedia.

When we sat down together, they said to me:

"We very much like your team and your solution. More than that, we are convinced that CoreMedia has the best product for all our needs in the next two to three years. Nonetheless, we wonder if we would be better off with Adobe in the long run. We might need the other things they provide at some point. What is your view about all-in-one vs. best-of-breed architectures?"

I think this is the important strategic question for many brand executives. Therefore, I want to share my answer publicly:

I am convinced that integrated all-in-one solutions aiming to cover all aspects of the customer experience will fail to live up to your expectations.

Here's why:

While it's a valid and proven strategy to standardize processes and to implement highly integrated solutions, it's not always a good fit. It works well for administrative systems like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) that run in the background, where processes are well established and don't define your brand or make you unique.

But your customer experience is (hopefully!) the exact opposite. It can never be static, it must make you unique, and it defines your brand more than anything else.

Customer experience has become the most important competitive advantage for brands. You simply cannot afford to be stuck with a commoditized cookie-cutter experience. And that's exactly what you will get with an all-in-one solution instead of best-of-breed system.

But that's not all. There's another big problem:

You need to be agile to stay competitive. A monolithic all-in-one solution is not agile – not by a long shot.

At the moment, customer experience is one of the most dynamic fields. The rate of innovation is rapidly increasing, with new trends being adopted, new platforms gaining traction, and new services going mainstream faster than ever before. The telephone reached 100M users after 74 years. Facebook did the same in just 4 1/2 years. And Pokémon GO? One month.

What if the next hot new thing reaches 100M users in a week and it becomes mission-critical for you to be there before your competition?

You can’t afford to wait for the vendor of your all-in-one solution to come up with a solution. First, it will take them time to adapt, if they care at all, and when they do finally provide a solution it will of course also be available to your competition.You'd neither be fast nor first.

At that point the dream of an all-in-one solution becomes a nightmare — you find you're wearing a straightjacket and there's not much you can do.

And even if you find an all-in-one solution that seems to address all your needs today (and maybe for the foreseeable future), how will you tackle the unanticipated new challenges of tomorrow? If you want to stand out, you need the freedom that comes from best of breed solutions.

My advice:

Stay agile. Use open platforms. Take advantage of out-of-the-box functionality as needed, but work with best-of-breed partners so you can innovate where it counts.

About CoreMedia

CoreMedia has emerged as the preferred content management vendor in the luxury, fashion, and beauty space. We enable the global market leader in luxury online retail, YOOX Net-A-Porter (YNAP), to build outstanding customer experiences. B2C fashion brands like Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, and an iconic Italian footwear company all updated their digital shopping experiences with CoreMedia, as did Boots and dm drugstores, who chose CoreMedia for their online stores and in-store kiosks. And B2B brands like Graybar and Emerson have adapted the same technology to massively improve their eCommerce experience.

CoreMedia offers out-of-the-box integrations with leading commerce platforms like IBM WebSphere Commerce, SAP Hybris, Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Magento, plus reference implementations for SAP YaaS and homegrown systems. CoreMedia’s Content Experience Platform enables brands and retailers to seamlessly add sophisticated content management to their existing store – efficiently and fast.

CoreMedia – Content matters

P.S. Glad you made it this far. And by the way, CoreMedia is hiring. 😀