When Hastie took over as CIO at TruServ in 1999, he applied the lessons he learned at Fel-Pro. No ERP system exists at the $2.4billion member-owned hardware cooperative. The enterprise is running on a suite of applications. They include The D&B Corp. for accounting; a "simple down-and-dirty" general ledger to record financials; a distribution system from EXE Technologies; a homegrown order management system; and what he calls a "data warehouse on steroids" from Business Objects that offers CRM-like analytics, which he assembled himself. This mix-and-match approach may be a little more work in terms of maintenance and integration (TruServ uses MicrosoftMicrosoft BizTalk Server and the Oracle Integration toolset to connect everything), but Hastie prefers it to the alternative. "You either have to write some of your own applications in-house or get a package and modify it," Hastie explains. "And like all modifications of enterprise application software, that prevents you from being able to upgrade easily." Alles zu Microsoft auf CIO.de

Hastie says that as cash has gotten tight, CIOs are getting back to basics. "If you look at the amount of mega millions that CIOs poured into ERP systems, you have to wonder how much further could we have gotten from the true core applications that a company runs on," Hastie says. "And now that IT budgets are getting crunched, those core applications are becoming the focus again."

"We had gotten into a trend where companies were buying massive amounts of stuff, signing a contract for a five-year project, and buying it all up front," says Jim Shepherd, senior vice president of enterprise applications for Boston-based AMR Research. He notes that some CIOs are still paying upward of 15 percent a year in maintenance on licenses they will never be able to use.

"Today, people are buying in much smaller increments than ever before, and they're not signing a contract for the entire suite of applications or buying up 50,000 seats," Shepherd adds. "Those kinds of projects are a thing of the past."

How to Avoid the Upgrade Headaches

When Rich Clow joined Deutsche Bank in New York City as vice president of eConsulting in June 2000, the financial services company had already decided to standardize on Siebel for CRM; it had invested $10million on several implementations. So in late 2001 when Clow was looking for a tool that could analyze customer profitability, Siebel was first through the door with a new tool it had acquired from another company. But Deutsche Bank had implemented half a dozen different versions of Siebel CRM in various business units, and all of that software would have to be upgraded before Siebel's new profitability analytics tool could be installed.