For many technology shoppers, best-of-breed solutions are a foreign concept, left for those with more time on their hands than the average CIO. Choosing one vendor that can do everything for their business might seem like the easiest route for insurers to go, but carriers can be cheating themselves of the opportunity to buy the best solution–or in this case, the best-of-breed solution. It may require more time and energy to complete these deals, but they also offer promising results. The concept of best of breed is taking an even bolder turn of late as vendors are creating strategic alliances among themselves to help make the shopping process easier for carriers and eliminate one of the bigger issues facing best-of-breed solutions–integration.

George Grieve, CEO of CastleBay Consulting, maintains one of the trends spurring vendor alliances is vendors no longer believe they have to build fully integrated systems that do everything. A second trend, Grieve adds, is users have come to realize such big-bang solutions are not necessarily the best option for them.

Not everyone would describe such agreements as being commonplace, though. Dave Gleberman, vice president of Appix Consulting, says he hasn't seen many vendor alliances in the insurance market, which surprises him because he sees plenty of vendors in the insurance space that don't have an integrated offering and tend to leave it up to the carrier to figure out integration issues.