Best-of-Breed Integration

A company needs software for many different tasks: accounting, warehouse management, customer support, personnel planning. There are two paths for this. Either you buy a large all-in-one package from a single provider that does a bit of everything. Or you look for the strongest available program for each area and then connect these programs with one another. The second path is called best-of-breed integration. The English expression literally means “the best of the breed” and comes from the language of animal breeding competitions. It refers to the winner of its category.

Peak performance versus convenience

The advantage lies in the quality of the individual building blocks. A provider that has focused solely on accounting for ten years knows every special rule of tax law. A corporation covering fifteen areas at once can rarely achieve this depth. Those who rely on specialists get more features in each area and usually faster updates as well.

There is also independence. Anyone who buys everything from a single provider falls into a dependency known as vendor lock-in: switching would be so expensive that it is practically ruled out. The provider can then raise prices without losing customers. With many small programs, on the other hand, each one can be individually replaced if it no longer fits.

The price for this is effort. Every connection between two programs must be built, tested, and maintained. If a provider redesigns its program, the connection can break. And in the event of an error, it is often unclear who is responsible. In practice, this exact question determines whether the approach is worthwhile.

How the individual pieces come together

The connection runs through so-called interfaces, usually called APIs. An interface is a defined language in which one program can request and provide data. The customer program, for example, reports a new order. The warehouse program then reserves the goods. The accounting program generates the invoice. Each step is an automatic exchange of data between two systems.

With three programs, individual connections are sufficient. With twenty programs, this becomes confusing, since the number of possible connections grows quickly. That is why a central hub is often placed in between. Each program only talks to this hub, and it distributes the data further. Such tools are called integration platforms or middleware.

A second problem is differing data formats. One program writes the date as 05.03.2025, another as 2025-03-05. One program calls the field “Customer,” another “Account.” Someone has to translate such differences, otherwise incorrect data or no data at all arrives. A common misconception is that an existing interface automatically takes care of this work. It only provides the channel, not the shared vocabulary.

The approach in the AI world

The debate is particularly visible right now in software involving artificial intelligence. A company can use one provider’s language model for writing texts, another for program code, and a third for searching its own documents. They are connected via interfaces in the background. For employees, however, it still looks like a single tool.

The term appears in financial news when large providers such as SAP, Salesforce, or Microsoft compete for customers. Their argument is: everything from a single source, one contract, one point of contact. Smaller, specialized firms counter with better individual products. How customers decide noticeably influences the stock market valuation of these companies.

In practice, many companies choose a middle path. For the core, they take a large system; for individual important areas, a specialist. The question, therefore, is rarely “all or nothing,” but rather: where is the additional integration effort truly worthwhile?