There’s a new buzzword making the rounds in enterprise software: “microservices.” And right behind it, another favorite: “platform.”
If you’ve evaluated SaaS vendors in the past few years, you’ve likely been promised a “fully integrated platform built on microservices.” On paper, it sounds like everything you’ve been asking for: modular architecture, faster innovation, simplified maintenance, seamless data sharing. But if you’ve used one of these solutions, chances are you’ve felt something quite different.
Five different login screens. Conflicting permission rules. Inconsistent terminology. Support tickets that bounce between teams. Data that doesn’t line up.
So what happened?
The reality is this: most SaaS vendors touting “microservices” and “platform architecture” are simply rebranding technical debt and merger & acquisition (M&A) baggage as innovation. These aren’t integrated solutions. They’re bundles. Frankenstein stacks cobbled together from acquired companies, each with their own database, logic, and codebase. Slapping a “microservice” label on top of five conflicting modules doesn’t fix the core problem, it just masks it. And when they acquire company #6? They do it all over again. Another product. Another codebase. Another half-baked adapter service to make it look like part of the “platform.”
We’ll break down what real SaaS architecture should look like, how buzzwords are being abused to sell duct-taped software, and how to tell the difference between a natively integrated solution and a marketing façade. We’ll share examples of how this bait-and-switch architecture creates painful customer experiences, and why we chose a different path.
You’ll leave with a clearer understanding of:
If you’ve ever wondered why your “integrated platform” feels so disconnected, you’re not alone. Let’s pull back the curtain.
At its core, the idea of microservices is simple: break software into modular components that do one thing well, and make them easy to deploy, scale, and update independently. Instead of a monolithic application where one bug or feature request can delay an entire release cycle, you have a distributed system where parts can evolve in parallel.
It’s a powerful idea, and when done right, it’s transformative.
The same goes for the “platform” concept. In theory, a platform is a common foundation that allows multiple solutions (or modules) to share core capabilities like user management, security, analytics, master data, notifications, and more. This shared backbone allows new functionality to plug in without reinventing the wheel or fragmenting the experience.
When platforms and microservices are combined effectively, the benefits are real:
A well-architected platform lets you turn individual features or modules on and off based on what the customer needs, without affecting the rest of the system. You don’t get the bloat of unnecessary features, and you don’t introduce instability when new ones are deployed.
Smaller codebases mean smaller teams can ship updates faster. If the inventory module needs a change, you don’t have to wait for the rest of the ERP suite to be tested and released.
Each service can scale independently. For example, if reporting or AI workload spikes, you can allocate resources there without scaling the whole stack.
A failure in one part of the system shouldn’t bring the whole solution down. Isolate problems, recover gracefully, and keep the rest of the system functional.
As customer needs evolve, a modular and service-oriented architecture allows vendors to adapt by introducing new capabilities, integrations, or vertical-specific features without rearchitecting the entire product.
With well-defined service boundaries, APIs become easier to manage, document, and use. That means better integrations, smoother automation, and faster partner onboarding.
These benefits are not imaginary. They are absolutely achievable, but only when the underlying system is intentionally designed that way from the start.
Unfortunately, that’s not what’s happening at many of the software companies now pushing these buzzwords. Instead of modularity, customers get fragmentation. Instead of speed, they get regression bugs. Instead of resilience, they get support teams saying, “that issue is in the other product.”
Why? Because most vendors didn’t build their software to be modular. They acquired five products and now they’re trying to glue them together just enough to make a demo look good. It’s a sleight of hand. And customers are the ones left cleaning up the mess.
So if the theory is sound, and the architecture works when it’s done right, why are so many vendors getting it wrong?
That’s what we’ll unpack next.
When a software company tells you they’ve “rebuilt everything as microservices,” they’re rarely telling you the full story.
Because in most cases, they didn’t rebuild anything. They bought it.
What many vendors call “platform strategy” today is actually a spreadsheet strategy driven by private equity firms and holding companies acquiring niche SaaS products and combining them under a single umbrella. Then comes the branding refresh, a handful of shared services, and a bold claim: “A fully integrated SaaS platform built on modern architecture.”
In reality, here’s what that usually means.
| Let’s say a vendor has acquired five companies over the past few years. Each one had: |
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You now have five separate products stitched together by a marketing team, not a product roadmap.
Customers see a unified logo and consistent color palette and assume the products must be connected under the hood. But they’re not. Behind the scenes, there are five databases, five workflows, five different definitions of the same business object (e.g., “customer”), and no clean way to make them play nicely together.
The solution? Enter the “shared microservice.”
To mask the chaos, the vendor spins up a few “core services”:
Each of the five original applications is modified just enough to delegate to these new services. The original products still exist in full, but now rely on external calls for login, access control, or some common data.
On paper, this is now a “microservices-based architecture.” In practice, it’s duct tape.
| This is the key test and the part nobody talks about. When the next product is added to the portfolio, it has to be: |
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And just like that, a sixth completely standalone product gets folded into the “integrated solution.”
Except it’s not integrated. It’s wired in just enough to look plausible on a sales demo.
| Under the hood, this new product still has: |
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When a customer complains about inconsistent behavior or a permissions issue, support needs to figure out which underlying product the issue came from. And if a fix is needed? That product team has to slot it into their own roadmap.
The tragedy is that many of these vendors are technically telling the truth. They do have microservices. They do have a shared login service. They do have a common UI wrapper.
But those elements don’t make it a platform.
A real platform is a shared foundation with consistent behavior, data models, and APIs. It’s built with cohesion and interoperability as design principles, not as retrofits. It’s something that product teams contribute to and evolve together, not something slapped on after an acquisition.
What most vendors offer today is better described as:
That’s not a platform. It’s a bundle.
And yet, because “microservices” and “platform” sound modern, scalable, and forward-thinking, they keep showing up in pitch decks. The buzzwords do their job. But customers who buy into the promise are left holding the bag.
| When the vendor hasn’t done the hard work to truly integrate their products, that work gets pushed downstream. Your team ends up: |
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And when something breaks? Each product team blames the other.
This isn’t a rare occurrence. It’s the dominant SaaS pattern today, especially in mature categories like ERP, CRM, and HR, where acquisition-fueled growth is common.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
In the next section, we’ll look at the ripple effects this has on actual users and why customers are increasingly skeptical of the “platform” pitch.
| What “Integrated” Really Feels Like on the Ground When vendors say, “fully integrated,” what customers hear is: |
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But what they get? It’s something else entirely.
This is where the gap between marketing and reality hits hardest: on the shop floor, in the finance department, at the admin console, and every time a user picks up the phone to call support. Let’s walk through what the day-to-day actually looks like for customers using these stitched-together, microservice-wrapped Frankenproducts.
Most of these “platforms” now use a shared login service. That should simplify things, but only if it’s consistent and actually central.
| What happens in practice: |
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| It’s not a platform. It’s a patchwork of login screens pretending to be one. |
Every enterprise product has permissions. But when five legacy products are wrapped in a single brand, you get five competing ways of defining roles and applying permissions.
Even with a “shared permissions service,” customers still see:
The result? Confused admins, annoyed users, and a steady stream of permission-related support tickets.
One of the biggest broken promises is the idea that data flows cleanly across modules.
In a real integrated solution, master data (customers, suppliers, parts, work orders, employees, etc.) is stored once and used everywhere. Updates are reflected instantly across all workflows. Reporting is clean. Automation is easy.
But in the integration theater model, it’s more like this:
It’s a data integrity disaster. And it slows down everything from quoting to invoicing to analytics. Or worse, it creates inconsistency in analytics, and a complete loss of confidence in the data.
You can rebrand an app, but you can’t hide the fact that it was built by a different company on a different stack.
Users can tell:
This isn’t just annoying, it kills productivity. Users lose confidence in the tool. They stop exploring new features. Training becomes more complex. And every new hire needs extra time just to learn the quirks.
One of the main reasons manufacturers invest in ERP or business software at all is to streamline cross-functional workflows. You want your order to flow from sales to production to shipping to invoicing without manual re-entry or babysitting.
| But when each stage is powered by a different product? |
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You end up with meetings to reconcile systems, spreadsheets to track hand-offs, and employees stuck copy-pasting between screens.
That’s not integration. That’s internal duct tape.
Each acquired product in the “platform” bundle usually comes with its own reporting engine:
So when leadership asks for a simple cross-module report—say, labor hours by production order by customer—you need:
Meanwhile, the vendor still claims their solution has “end-to-end visibility” and “full transparency.”
When something breaks in an integrated solution, users expect support to own the issue and fix it fast.
But when the architecture is fragmented:
In the worst-case scenario, the customer has to explain their own setup and try to troubleshoot it themselves.
Users don’t care about architecture diagrams or microservices. They care that their software works. When it doesn’t, they don’t blame the database or the M&A strategy. They blame the vendor.
That’s why so many customers feel like they were sold a lie.
They bought a “platform.” They got five tools with a shared logo and a broken experience.
Let’s take a step back and reframe the problem.
Software integration shouldn’t be something the customer has to think about. It should be invisible. You shouldn’t have to ask whether your user permissions sync between modules. You shouldn’t need to export a CSV just to pass data from production to inventory. You shouldn’t be afraid of turning on a new feature because it might break something else.
And yet that’s the norm with today’s so-called “platforms.”
So what does real integration actually look like? It looks like what we built.
Not because we chased buzzwords like “platform” and “microservices,” but because we started with a simple principle: All parts of the solution should be aware of each other, work together naturally, and evolve as a whole.
Here’s what that looks like in practice.
This isn’t just cleaner for us, it’s better for you. Updates are faster. Support is more responsive. And there’s no risk of version mismatches or conflicting logic across modules.
Every business object (customer, part, order, invoice, etc.) exists in one place and follows one set of rules.
When a user creates a new item, it’s available to every part of the solution instantly. No sync jobs. No middleware. No duplication. The master data is the system. This simplifies everything:
With fragmented software, data is a liability. In our solution, it’s a strength.
There’s no second admin panel. No module-specific access control. No edge cases where “this screen doesn’t use the new role system yet.”
Our user management and permission model is unified across the entire solution. That means:
And when you onboard a new employee, you don’t have to figure out five sets of access rules. Just assign a role and go.
From a user’s perspective, everything feels the same (because it is).
When we enhance the interface, those improvements benefit the entire solution, not just one corner of it.
This means your team ramps up faster, makes fewer mistakes, and feels confident exploring new features.
We didn’t design our modules as standalone tools. We designed them as parts of a larger system that solve real-world workflows.
So instead of handoffs between disconnected apps, our solution enables:
Your processes shouldn’t stop at module boundaries. With us, they don’t.
Yes, we have services. But we didn’t build them to glue things together, we built them because that’s how modern software should work.
Services like: |
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These services are truly shared and used across every feature and module, not layered on after the fact. They’re part of our foundation, not a retrofit.
When you contact us with a question or problem, you’re not getting routed between teams supporting five different apps.
You’re talking to someone who knows the entire solution. Someone who has access to the full picture and can help you holistically.
We don’t punt. We don’t deflect. We own it. That’s what being integrated means.
At the end of the day, your team doesn’t care how many services run behind the scenes. They care that they can get their job done.
Real integration means:
And when you add a new feature or turn on a new module? It feels like turning on a light switch, not like stitching together a new app.
When we started building our solution, we didn’t set out to build a “platform.” We didn’t pitch VCs on a “composable microservices architecture.” We weren’t trying to win points on a Gartner feature checklist.
We were solving real problems for real manufacturers.
That meant something different than what most software companies were building. We didn’t want isolated tools with bolt-on integrations. We wanted a system that could handle the messy reality of shop floors, inventory turns, customer change requests, scheduling chaos, and evolving business rules. We needed flexibility. We needed consistency. And we needed performance.
So we built something simple, durable, and scalable: A single product with a shared foundation and real architectural discipline.
Here’s how that decision played out and why it still matters.
Modern software design patterns are valuable, but only when they’re applied deliberately.
| We didn’t fragment the product just to say we were “microservices-based.” Instead, we identified shared capabilities and separated them out when it made sense: |
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These components didn’t start as services. They became services because they were mature, well-defined, and used broadly. That’s what real modularity looks like: earned, not faked.
A lot of vendors build APIs for partners but keep the internals of their product brittle and siloed.
We did the opposite.
We focused first on internal consistency, on making sure everything our team built worked together, used shared components, and followed common patterns. The result? Our internal APIs are solid, clean, and well understood so when we expose functionality to customers, it’s robust and predictable.
This gives us agility. It lets us move fast without breaking things. It’s why we can release new features without accidentally disrupting your operations.
It’s easy to fall in love with technology for technology’s sake. Containers, orchestration, service meshes, feature flags, edge deployments; it all sounds impressive in a slide deck.
But unless those things translate to a better customer experience, they’re just noise.
We made choices based on one question: Will this make the product easier to use, implement, support, scale, or evolve for our customers?
That’s why we’ve modernized our UI framework but kept the interaction patterns familiar.
Why we ship features iteratively (daily!) instead of in giant releases.
Why we built a common data model and stuck to it.
We didn’t do any of it to be trendy. We did it to be useful and valuable.
Some vendors think in terms of product portfolios. We think in terms of product ownership.
That means:
It also means our team operates with shared goals, shared context, and shared accountability. When we improve scheduling, we’re thinking about how it affects inventory, maintenance, and reporting, not just one feature in isolation.
That’s what it means to be natively integrated. It’s not just a technical claim; it’s a mindset and a culture.
Here’s the thing: if we’ve done our job right, you’ll never need to think about any of this.
You won’t ask, “Is this feature part of the same module?”
You won’t care, “Is this a separate product under the hood?”
You won’t wonder, “Will this break something else if I turn it on?”
You’ll just use the solution. And it will work the way you expect.
That’s the payoff of doing it the hard way. Of building it right from the start. Of not feeding the temptation of filling product gaps by buying new capabilities and bolting them on.
Before you sign a contract or even sit through a demo, ask the vendor a few simple questions, the ones that reveal what’s really under the hood.
Anyone can say “we’re a platform.” Anyone can say “we use microservices.” The trick is knowing when those words actually mean something and when they’re hiding a mess.
Here’s how to find out.
If the answer is more than one, you’re not buying one solution. You’re buying a bundle. Multiple codebases usually means:
Anyone can say “we’re a platform.” Anyone can say “we use microservices.” The trick is knowing when those words actually mean something and when they’re hiding a mess.
Here’s how to find out.
A single codebase is a strong sign of native integration.
Watch for vague answers. Ask:
Push for specifics. If they can’t tell you exactly how the parts of the solution communicate or if those connections rely on middleware or sync jobs, you’re not getting real integration.
This is where most “platforms” break down. If roles and permissions behave differently in different modules, you’re in for a world of administrative pain.
A unified permission model is table stakes for any modern SaaS solution.
This one cuts through the marketing noise fast.
If the vendor acquired five products and each one still has its own roadmap, backlog, and development team, then you’re dealing with an integration façade. Internal silos create external friction. Always.
You’re looking for an answer that sounds like:
“We turn it on. It just works.”
Not:
Ask how data flows between modules. Is there one “customer” object used across CRM, invoicing, production, and support? Or five slightly different ones duct-taped together?
If data isn't unified, your operations won't be either.
These questions aren’t technical traps. They’re basic due diligence.
You wouldn’t buy five forklifts from five different vendors and expect them to run on the same battery. Don’t buy five apps and expect them to run like one solution.
If you’ve made it this far, you’ve probably experienced it firsthand:
A “platform” that feels like five separate tools.
A “microservices architecture” that breaks whenever one element changes.
An implementation and support team that doesn’t understand how their own product fits together.
A vendor that says, “fully integrated” and leaves you doing the integrating.
You’re not imagining it. The industry is full of software that was never meant to work together and vendors who are trying to hide that fact behind new terminology.
We don’t blame customers for being skeptical. We’re skeptical too.
If you’ve made it this far, you’ve probably experienced it firsthand:
| One codebase | One set of services shared across the entire solution | One team that builds, implements, supports, and evolves it, all together |
| One set of master data | ||
| One UI |
You shouldn’t need an integration plan to use your ERP. You shouldn’t need a training program to explain why three modules behave differently. You shouldn’t need a spreadsheet to reconcile five sets of data that claim to be the same.
You should be able to log in, do your job, and trust that everything works together, as a holistic, integrated solution. If your current vendor is selling you an illusion of integration, it’s time to ask harder questions.
And if you’re looking for a solution that will deliver on the promise of modern architecture, without the marketing theater, we’d love to show you how we’re doing it.
No buzzwords. No bundles. Just software that works.
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Our efforts began as an internal project of Mancor Industries when we identified the need for a more cohesive ERP system to manage the complexity of multiple plants, multiple products, multiple customers and multiple functions.
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