System Solutions: A Best-of-Breed Strategy

Indeed, there’s an entire niche of integration or middleware applications, but these typically are designed for companies using name-brand CRM and enterprise resource planning systems rather than the systems that catalog or direct marketing companies need.

There also are a growing number of Web-based systems that rely on Web Services integration and XML for data exchange. These tend to be newer, less mature applications, but they do offer advantages in being essentially more transparent from a platform and support perspective. (These are sometimes available only from Application Service Providers on a pay-per-use basis, although some can be purchased and run on your own servers.) However, since there’s as much diversity in server, database and programming platforms for the Web as there is for client/server or legacy platforms, Web-based systems are hardly a panacea.