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.

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

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