Jan 22, 2008
Integrated Solutions Well - Really Are!
Remember this one?
Software support technician on phone to customer: "That sounds like a hardware problem."
Hardware support technician on phone to same customer: "That is definitely a software issue."
I'm here to tell you those days are no longer. At least when it comes to vendors having the expertise to recommend and even integrate technologies that are not their own. There was a day, for example, when customers wanting to integrate a document composition system and an archive system would end up researching and installing both solutions independently.
Their greatest hope?
That the two selected vendors would have at least heard of each other!
Today you can (and should) expect much more than that.
As the document's value across the enterprise becomes more and more evident it requires that these previously autonomous solutions need to work together easily to provide the highest value to the customer. It's not about identifying a customer's budget amount and then dividing that by the price of one of your boxes to see how many you can sell them. It's about working with the customer to identify as many benefits as possible and thinking outside the scope of what one product can do.
Every single vendor in our industry - across all product types - can talk knowledgeably about government compliance issues. They can explain how their product helps and can also speak to how integrating additional products - not necessarily their own - can put the customer in the best possible position to meet compliance requirements. Don't get me started on SEC 17 CFR Part 240 (and I'm only the marketing person for crying out loud!)
So how did all us vendors get so smart?
Experience.
Software applications didn't always integrate as easily as they do now, however customers have always needed applications to work together. It was quite common to get to the customer site and have them tell you about all the other applications they're using as part of their bigger document strategy - applications that needed to work together.
You know what else was common? A "deer in the headlights" look on the face of the vendor's professional services rep!
Yikes!
At Elixir, we took this in stride (once we wiped the look off our faces!) and sat down and figured out how to extend our applications to better serve larger solutions.
Proprietary technologies made it challenging in the early days but that forced us to really learn about how other systems worked. A natural result of this process was an understanding of what actually comprised an overall document solution.
Today our applications have APIs making it easy for customers, partners and our own professional services to integrate with other systems. We also added software tools and features that make our applications even more valuable when integrated into a larger solution.
The point is vendors have gone beyond having exposure to complementary technologies and we now have experience. We've all cut our teeth connecting other systems to our own, writing custom programs, and working together to build integrated solutions.
We don't casually recommend each other's products and services.
Like any successful implementation of our own --- we each know that a quality multi-vendor solution will bring the most benefit to our 
customers providing us the opportunity to work together in the future.
We all want happy customers.
After all, if mom was right and your face really could freeze like that - it's best to be smiling at the time.