ONE WEEK AFTER THE IMPLOSION, Pilot filed Chapter 7 inOakland Bankruptcy Court. Its website, The Pilot.net, made nomention of the company´s troubles. In fact, the site lookedexactly the same as it had before the collapse. It had aneerie feel, like some Western ghost town.

Pilot´s outage couldn´t have come at a worse time for AnnMarie Durso, CIO of VisionTek, a memory and graphics cardcompany in Gurnee, Ill. She had joined the company in October2000 and was in the thick of a strategic ERPERP project thatwill help the company launch online retail sales. An outagewould mean revenue losses on online sales, and each daywithout a secure, high-speed connection would add severaldays to the ERP project. Alles zu ERP auf CIO.de

VisionTek has subscribed to Pilot for four years. Like amarriage, the partners just got comfortable talkingless. SecuritySecurity was assumed, and just two months before Pilotwent down, Durso had been baited with a renewaldiscount. Pilot offered to renew her contract at a cut rateif she paid for a full year up front. She did. Alles zu Security auf CIO.de

"We got blindsided," she says. "We thought [that since] thiswas a provider that had been around since ´96 for us, therewas less of an inclination for us to question them. Butoutsourcing isn´t an abdication. You can´t just hand itoff. Ultimately, the business will hold me accountable, so Ihave to manage the third parties. I have to constantly ask,Are they still growing? Can they handle scale? Are theykeeping their skills up?"

As soon as Durso heard about Pilot, she and her networkmanager, Mike Brown, went from office to office briefingVisionTek´s executives, one at a time, on what the collapsemeant to the company.