Be Very Afraid of Frankenstein
By Kyle Nations
Oct 30, 2020
Table of Contents
It seems apropos to write a blog this Halloween season about Frankenstein. However, I’m not referring to Mary Shelley’s classic novel, or the 1931 movie by the same name, starring the incomparable Boris Karloff.
Frankenstein Approach
Some software companies have taken a “Frankenstein approach” to developing solutions for the market to solve all sorts of challenges - including price optimization and management, and delivering sales insights to frontline salespeople. They may start out with a core technology solution but as market demand creates new opportunities for product extensions - rather than build these capabilities on a single, solid, integrated platform - they buy the necessary components and consequently string them together. Through product or business acquisition, they ‘bolt-on’ the extended capabilities to the core solution in whatever fashion they can. Often this results in a disjointed approach that is hardly seamless in terms of software development or customer implementations.
Monstrous Customer Experiences
From a customer perspective, any interaction with a company’s technology is viewed as part of the brand experience. Customers don’t see, nor should they have to, component parts developed on different platforms by different teams at different times - strung together in whatever way might be possible to piece together a solution. Customers inevitably judge a technology partner based on seamless interactions with all components of the solution they’ve purchased. That experience is very difficult to offer with acquired components strung together like paper dolls.
If the solution doesn’t unify all components, then it will often be a struggle to connect the parts fluidly or to receive regular upgrades from the technology partner without disruption to the business. Frankenstein systems just won’t give the seamless integration and fluid upgrade paths today’s businesses require to sustain their operations without disruption.
Dressing up your Business with an Integrated Solution
Frankenstein solutions leave you and your company vulnerable—to evolving technology standards, changes in your business processes, and escalating market and customer requirements for sales and service. By contrast, a holistic, integrated solution like the Zilliant IQ Platform draws on the synthesized and accumulated delivery experience of hundreds of customers and billions of transactions, processed fluidly, with results delivered harmoniously to all parts of the solution. This approach enables cohesive, real-time actionable insights that drive better-informed and unified pricing and sales decisions.
From the ground up, Zilliant has built a cloud-native, multi-tenant SaaS platform - a single fully-integrated instance of its software applications. In addition to being the most modern and expedient approach to software development, it is also the most economical model, as maintenance costs are shared and updates made only once for all clients. Unlike some competitors, this is not a new development for Zilliant; we moved to the cloud back in 2009 and completely clean-sheet-architected a solution in 2011, migrating all customers to the unified platform by 2016.
Moreover, the Zilliant platform is built and deployed using micro-services that easily integrate into any cloud environment, allowing for very rapid development, deployment, portability and upgrading of all applications and solution components in the Zilliant product suite. This also facilitates seamless integration of new, organically-developed products and product features and extensions, as well as more easily coupling Zilliant capabilities with market-leading solutions such as CPQ, eCommerce, CRM and ERP systems.
How Should You Outfit This Year?
The current state of technology solutions leaves you with an important choice:
Should I engage a technology partner like Zilliant that offers a purpose-built solution, designed with performance and compatibility in mind? Do I want my company to have the most powerful and tightly integrated solution available on the market, designed to solve today’s biggest pricing and sales challenges?
Or, would I rather take my chances with a Frankenstein-like approach?
It’s a simple choice: Trick? Or Treat?
Zilliant delivers proven, market-leading technology grounded in data science that uses two decades of experience and innovative approaches for solving today’s most complex pricing and sales challenges. Reach out to me at kyle.nations@zilliant.com or connect with me on LinkedIn. Let us help you take the fear out of deploying new software to support your pricing and sales teams.
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