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At
M&M, we believe in the best-of-breed policy-going for the best product and
value advantage. When it comes to managing IT, keeping pace with rapidly
evolving technology is very critical. The vendors of best-of-breed products
focus on technology and functional enhancement and define future strategy to
maintain their leadership. Hence one is assured of maintaining technology
advantage.
Technology relevance to
the business is obviously a pre-requisite. The technology should enable business
and ensure value advantage. There are some issues-integration with other
best-of-breed hardware and software components, accountability for problem
resolution, and identification of root-cause. But these issues can be tackled
through proper relationship management and defining right accountability. When
more than one best-of-breed products jointly forms a business solution (eg the
best-of-breed storage solution and best in class enterprise server), it is
necessary to define the responsibilities and accountability clearly at the
negotiation stage itself.
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Arvind Tawde
VP and CIO, Mahindra & Mahindra |
The best-of-breed
policy may be comparatively expensive-depending on your negotiating ability.
But the capability to deliver best solutions to meet business requirements would
justify the investments.
Success of the
best-of-breed option depends on the ability to manage different vendors and make
them work together as a team for your organization.
In the year 1997,
M&M had gone for SAP as ERP solution. This was found the best amongst 17 ERP
solutions available worldwide after critical evaluation by a cross-functional
team. However, for product development process and product data management, we
went for Metaphase (EDS Teamcenter) since SAP PLM was not the best of product in
this category at that time. The same approach is followed for procuring various
IT Infrastructure components and related solutions.
IT infrastructure
security is ensured using best-of-breed products in various areas of security
such as anti-virus, firewall, intrusion detection, content scanning. All these
products are effectively managing IT infrastructure security in totality.
As told to Shrikanth G
shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in Page(s) 1
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