Why Platform Solutions Suit You Better Than Point Solutions

Facilitating the complex operations of a modern business requires you to use advanced solutions. However, whether to use point solutions or platform solutions is based on your current business state, your future goals, and your strategy to reach them.

Let us briefly explain these solutions before we explore them in detail.

What Is a Point Solution?

It’s a program designed to serve a single and specific purpose, typically featuring the best-of-breed technologies. These strictly serve the value proposition for which they’re designed. Customers only get what they pay for and the scope for customization is limited, for the solution is usually made for a wide range of businesses. 

As a result, the various point solutions could be operating in silos. Further, making these solutions work in unison can bring challenges in UX and operational continuity.

Examples: Slack, Skype, help desk software like Freshdesk, etc. These are easy-to-install solutions and promptly deliver what they’re meant to deliver – all without requiring any further upgrades or applications.

What Is an Integrated or Platform Solution?

When multiple applications are created to meet different purposes using a foundational platform, they’re referred to as platform solutions. 

As businesses aim to unify their diverse operations, they’re looking for integrated or platform solutions that provide UX and operational continuity. These solutions break the silos and enable frictionless data sharing across the organization. Consequently, they offer greater flexibility and customizability. They provide a higher degree of data security, user convenience and customer delight. 

Examples: Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics 365, etc. A few platform solution providers even allow developers to create custom applications for the company’s internal use.

Advantages of Point Solutions

For small and mid-sized companies, point solutions make sense in select circumstances. Following are a few of such circumstances:

Special Focus

Point solutions are designed with a specific need in mind. They are uniquely suited for businesses with the same focus and no plans to scale up in the near future. For example, helpdesk software is designed for customer support, while a CRM solution (like Salesforce) is tailored for sales and marketing teams.

Faster Implementation

These work for businesses that want their employees to hit the ground running without requiring training for software use.

Cost Efficiency

As they are built only for certain functions, point solutions come at a highly optimized cost. Businesses needn’t pay for peripheral benefits that come with the core offering.

Best-Of-Breed

Since they are built with a specific focus, point solutions are often best-of-breed with a niche industry/channel focus.

Low Maintenance

Their bespoke character makes it easy to quickly replace a particular solution without interrupting other solutions.

Best Technology Support

Point solutions are intensely focused on innovation and customer support to stay competitive. So, businesses tend to benefit from frequent feature upgrades.

As you can see, point solutions offer a strong value proposition to small or mid-sized companies. These continue to serve well if a business’ circumstances are largely the same. But it’s when these companies aim to grow their business that they fall short.

These disadvantages are why many organizations are veering towards platform solutions. Let’s look at these in detail.

When Platform Solutions Are Better Than Point Solutions

As your business grows, you may notice that point solutions fall short in several areas, like the ones discussed below. That’s where Platform Solutions excel:

Vendor Management

At a nascent stage, it’s necessary to employ a set of point solutions for specific needs. However, as the business grows, you may engage multiple vendors for the solutions. Any problem anywhere can affect the smooth running of your business operations.

User Experience

It’s easier to manage a limited set of diverse applications. However, as the number of applications increases, you need a consistent UX across all the applications for higher productivity. Otherwise, switching from one application to another will require some time and effort.

Consolidated Reporting

At early growth stages, it’s easier to manually collate numerous reports and create a consolidated report. As a business scales, consolidating multiple reports is a cumbersome task. You need an integrated system with the ability to generate consolidated reports.

Cost Efficiency

The total cost of ownership can increase significantly as your vendors increase. You need to factor in the training costs for each application too. Since all applications are different and regularly updated, the training costs keep on increasing.

Smoother IT Operations

Handling multiple point solutions is fraught with challenges. It puts a greater strain on the IT department to enable frictionless IT operations. Further, any error anywhere can put the entire system at risk.

Configuration Flexibility

Point solutions are good within the area of their limited functionality. However, they don’t lend themselves to easy customization for your unique business requirements.

Compliance Preparedness

As point solutions operate in silos, compliance gaps are likely to emerge. As it’s said – a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Even if a single point solution is not updated in line with the latest regulations, it can affect the entire business process.

Some software may not offer regular updates, which can even cause compliance issues as there can be a gap between changes in regulations and features or configurations available within the solution.

In short, you need Platform Solutions as your business grows.

How to Decide Which Platform Solutions Provider Is Right for You

To help you decide the best platform solutions provider for your unique business needs, here are the factors to consider:

Customization

As your business grows, you need solutions that can be customized for your unique needs and workflows. Your team must be empowered to promptly configure the solution as and when required.

Scalability

To quickly support increasing workloads, you need the ability to scale rapidly with ease. In the face of evolving business conditions, capacity constraints can impact operational continuity and customer delight.

Security

Considering the enormous amount of data within your business systems, protecting your data against cyberattacks or breaches is vital. A partner with cloud-powered solutions is best positioned to offer the highest degree of data security.

Tech Support

As the business systems grow complex, the time, effort, and costs for tech support increase dramatically. You need a single partner with the ability to provide integrated, end-to-end tech support to run your operations smoothly.

Strategic Alignment

You need a provider who has the market-proven capacity to support your current and future goals too. The provider must possess the ability to fuel your growth engine and must be aligned with your strategic focus for the next 3-5 years.

Ease of Integration

Check the level of technology integrations possible. Avoid solutions that offer limited or impartial integrations. Also, check if the configurations can be customized because this impacts your ability to add new use cases over time. Lastly, check the compatibility level of the solution with your hardware and software requirements.

Conclusion

At the early stages of your business, point solutions are apt for your needs. However, as your business scales, you will find them inadequate to support your growing business.

As you grow, your enterprise data increases multifold too, necessitating multiple databases. The use of multiple solutions and databases results in data silos, affecting your decision making. At this stage, having a unified platform gives you access to accurate and complete data.

That’s why you’ll need Platform Solutions as you scale your business. These save a lot of time and cost that can be otherwise spent in working with multiple point solutions. But that’s not all. You must find a solution provider that aligns with your strategic focus and offers you the best customization, scalability and tech support.