Yesterday I was teaching at the (excellent) Online Marketing Summit when a marketing director at a mid-sized enterprise conveyed a too-familiar story.

His firm had acquired an enterprise license to the FatWire (now Oracle's) web content and experience management suite to power their public sites. FatWire upsold them a bevy of other tools, promising "an integrated suite." Well, integration among them has proven a nightmare, and blown out their budget.

The customer had special difficulty with Mobility Server. As our Web CMS Report readers know, FatWire acquired its Mobility Server via a separate acquisition, and it runs on a completely different technology stack from the CMS platform. Sadly, these delays led to the customer postponing a comprehensive mobile roll-out for another year, patching and scraping in the meantime.

Of course, when these troubles arise, there's blame to go around. Caveat emptor, and all that.

But in the meantime, some advice: always start with the proposition that a vendor's "suite" is no better integrated than if you had selected separate, standalone tools from different suppliers. Put the burden of proof on the vendor to produce an integrated experience throughout your usage scenarios, rather than the leaving the onus on you to point out the gaps.

If we can help you in any way, feel free to get in touch with me.