Siebel admits that although its Inquire module could have provided visibility into profitability, it could not have delivered the kind of profitability engine Deutsche Bank required. "It wasn’t a core capability or function of that solution," says David Carter, general manager of Siebel Finance in San Mateo, Calif. "You can always write additional code to make it work, but it wasn’t an exact fit."

Last summer, Clow joined New York City-based Citi Cards as vice president of technology architecture and strategy. The credit card company, Clow explains, has no CRM suite but is about to close on a large deal with a small customer data model company to handle customer management. "We needed to add tools around contact management, but we decided to look at small, on-the-cusp types of companies, like small e-mail companies or business performance software vendors," says Clow. Citi Cards will be investing tens of millions of dollars on the customer management project on the assumption that it will pay for itself in less than a year -- something few big CRM suites can claim. Smaller vendors are now providing best-of-breed functionality and open architecture that can easily integrate with other solutions -- including CRM suites -- using standards like J2EE or simple object access protocol, says Clow.

Christensen was facing a similar situation at Fleet when she discovered that the bank would have had to upgrade the entire organization to Siebel 7.0 in order to use the vendor’s lead management tool. And Fleet had greatly customized the earlier release, making the upgrade option an expensive proposition. (For how to minimize the scope and expense of enterprise software upgrades, see "Less Pain, More Gain," available at www.cio.com/printlinks.) In contrast, an application processing interface was all that was required to connect the MarketSoft point application to the existing Siebel systems package.

So despite the fact that Fleet, the seventh largest financial holding company in the United States, had purchased a lot of extra licenses from Siebel, Christensen made the decision to go with a small, targeted application. Fleet invested just over a million dollars on the MarketSoft lead management product. The navigational tool operated on rules that each of Fleet’s business unit managers could customize and change over time. In contrast, the Siebel lead management module was based on rules hard-coded into the system, as they are in most enterprise suites. If Christensen had needed changes or customization, she would have had to call in a programmer.