Trends Report

Retail Enterprise Apps Evolution

Should Retailers Prolong Their Best-Of-Breed Strategy Or Adopt An Enterprise Suite?

May 16th, 2008
George Lawrie, Vice President, Principal Analyst
George Lawrie Vice President, Principal Analyst
With contributor:
Sharyn Leaver

Summary

Retailer process and applications professionals face mounting costs for adapting their portfolios of legacy point solutions to support interactions with consumers across channels and manage more sophisticated data about merchandise with shorter life cycles. But for most, the standardization, integration, and uniformity benefits of an application suite or ERP implementation do not yet outweigh the immaturity of the emerging retail suites. Emerging standards and tools enable retailers to better manage heterogeneous apps, but most will make their decision about best-of-breed or enterprise suites based on the relative importance to their strategy of either merchandise data enrichment or process agility.

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