Not all multivendor alliances end in disaster, however. That's because they have started out with the understanding that all they will achieve is interface integration. They also understood from the get-go that vendors are like two cats in the living room: one has to willingly cede the higher spot on the furniture to the other if there is to be any peace between them.
David Root, CFO for Eagle's Flight, an Ontario-based management training company, thinks he has found the right combination of partners in Great Plains, a North Dakota-based maker of ERP software for small and midsize companies (recently acquired by Microsoft), and Siebel, the giant CRM software company that focuses primarily on the Fortune 500. In this multivendor relationship, Siebel is the alpha cat. It has stronger brand recognition and a much larger customer base than Great Plains. So Great Plains has been willing to take on the lion's share of the integration work and provide all the support for customers. "We accept what Siebel throws over the fence to us, but we do have a voice in deciding what they throw," says Holly Holt, senior product manager of front office with Great Plains.
More important, the integration between the two products is of the note-passing variety rather than the hard-core melding that Oracle aspired to with CPG. The note-passing mechanism makes upgrading the integration simpler and cheaper, and users can adjust the frequency of the note passing to get to near real-time. But the work of integrating the software has been nowhere near that fast. "Things do move more slowly than if we were dealing with each vendor individually," says Root. Now that Microsoft has purchased Great Plains, Root will be watching carefully to see if the pace slows any further.
Green Mountain's Prevo finds that he often has to herd his vendors into a room to get them moving. "We find that we have to get PeopleSoft and Vertex to talk together in front of us to get a solution that works," he says.
Yet despite all the potential problems with multivendor integration, Prevo and Root say they have little choice but to try to make it work. "We looked into the cost issue of integrating something ourselves versus buying preintegrated software, and there was no comparison," says Root. But changes to Great Plains software alone would have required his staff to rewrite the interfaces between Great Plains and Siebel every six months. "We just couldn't have afforded to do it," Root concludes.
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