Is craving for best of breed applications coming back? It appears so, at least increasingly more, in the retail industry that I am part of for the last 15 years. Users and increasingly IT managers have started to ask for BoB applications replacing either their legacy ERPs or so called State of the Art ERPs. As a context, there was a time, may be 15 - 20 years back, when the IT landscape in a retail company used to consist of predominantly heterogeneous group of homegrown or purchased applications that met or exceeded retailers needs and were cobbled together with manual or point-to-point interfaces that worked in fits and starts but users and SMEs clung to such system because it appeared to have tailor made for their requirements - a so called best of breed application for them. Retailers maintained them at great cost with huge manpower locked in IT that was not their core competency. Then came the wave to enterprise ERP vendors like Retek (now Oracle Retail) and SAP, who started to sell their wares to retailers and pretty soon retailers - at least the top ones who could afford such costly systems - started to jump on the bandwagon to reduce their IT manpower. Pretty soon, such enterprise ERP were the norm, at least among the top retailers.
Well the wheel seems to have turned a full circle, and retailers have started to clamor for best of breed applications again, but for entirely different reasons.