BPM Viewpoint: Suite Vs. Stand-Alone: The Latest Debate

Business performance management (BPM) was the little kid on the finance-application block when it emerged as a category of software a few years ago. Stand-alone BPM packages sit on top of mammoth enterprise resource planning (ERP) suites, giving companies budgeting, reporting and analytics capabilities that fit their needs. In Business Finance articles on the debate about suite vs. best-of-breed, there was never any doubt where BPM software from non-ERP vendors fell.

But times are changing, and the scrawny kid is bulking up. BPM systems will never challenge ERP as transactional repositories, but they are becoming bigger and more complex every year. And the "stand-alone vs. suite" discussion is beginning to surface within BPM-specific software purchase decisions. Several major players in the BPM software space completed recent acquisitions in a push to offer a broader spectrum of BPM functionality. Then late last year, they announced that they had integrated those disparate systems into comprehensive product suites.

The appeal of the suites is easy to understand. Without one, a complex company with lots of operational data coming from a wide range of source systems has to assemble a variety of software packages to cover budgeting, forecasting, consolidations, management reporting and financial analytics. In the process, the organization struggles to ensure that the applications always use the same up-to-date version of all data. The total cost of this undertaking can quickly skyrocket because of the effort required to maintain a myriad of different data connections.

But, warn many consultants, BPM buyers looking for consolidated data management and ease of integration from product bundles sold as suites need to do their homework. The promise of tight connectivity may be hollow. Some software packaged as a "suite" is tied together more at a marketing level than in the source code. The user interface may look the same across products -- which can be a plus for training requirements -- but under the covers, applications that share a name and front end may still be radically different.