For as long as packaged software has existed, there has been extended debate on the benefits of BOB (best of breed) v’s E2E (end to end).  This debate spans the entire software industry as vendors seek to stretch their product capability wider or deeper, rarely doing both successfully.  This product strategy is usually driven by the software vendor who either stretches into an adjacent market area, or doubles-down and becomes a specialist in one area.  But what does that mean for the customer?

BOB has one huge benefit for customers, agility.  Both technical and commercial, the agility of being able to replace components of your solution landscape is attractive.  Vendor performance and market advances can be monitored, and components replaced as better technology or services are brought to market.  Also, the customer knows that the R&D investment they support is focused on making that one core solution the best it can be.

E2E also has the huge benefit of being a one-stop-shop for your solution.  No need to manage the procurement and integration of multiple vendor products, both for initial deployment and for follow-up when things go wrong.  But this does come with the “all the eggs in one basket” warning label.  With E2E you have a large replacement programme if the solution needs to be changed.

Here at Flui we have adopted a hybrid approach to this age-old dilemma.  Our software is BOB for market interaction, meter data management and MHHS compliance.  However, we also provide a suite of packaged adapters allowing our clients to deploy an E2E solution with proven adapters for the industry (DIP, CSS, DCC) and Billing/CIS providers.  We have chosen not to compromise on our focus of providing the best performing and most reliable market interaction software on the market, while removing the integration risk for our clients when deploying alongside their preferred billing solution.  When it comes to BOB v’s E2E, we believe agility trumps all.