Vendors of enterprise suites had presented the choice between their offerings and best-of-breed packages in black-and-white terms. Take the whole suite, they said, or your chain won't reap the benefits of a single-applications environment. Retail information-systems executives, however, are seeing a lot of gray. And software companies who want to play in the lucrative retail marketplace are now beginning to pay more attention to retailer concerns about integration with existing applications, overly optimistic implementation timetables, and the (horny issue of opening up enterprise suites to best-of-breed applications from third-party providers.
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