Furthermore, the MarketSoft product required less business process change than Siebel’s and had the potential to pay for itself in a year, at a time when Fleet was hurting financially (revenue was down 27 percent and profits were down 76 percent in 2001), says Christensen, now a freelance CRM consultant in Andover, Mass. "I was able to target the investment to match the revenue and enable a best-of-breed solution versus going with a CRM suite that had many more business processes that I’d have to implement or take out, and I didn’t want to do that," she explains. Using MarketSoft "was an example of a laser-focused implementation to meet the economic need."

Siebel executives say Fleet would not have gone in that direction if there had been a match between the company’s enterprise objectives and business decisions further down the line. "Fleet had made a huge commitment to Siebel at an executive level, but that didn’t translate down," says Siebel’s Carter. "At the business level, they were focused on a very narrow piece of functionality -- they were looking specifically for lead management and not a broader enterprise solution."

Most CIOs, however, are searching for just these kinds of lower risk, quicker return investments. "[CIOs are] all looking for limited risk investments with payback in a year’s time," Christensen says. "Today, CIOs are looking at ways to invest only in what they need to deliver fairly certain results."

The Web Services Glue

CIOs who have the benefit of a clean slate can avoid some of the big three-letter application suites from the get-go. At Cubist Pharmaceuticals, a Lexington, Mass.-based biotech company that develops antimicrobial drugs that fight life-threatening hospital infections, IT Director Kelly Schmitz is creating a flexible architecture that will support the company’s current financial systems and also its future sales, data warehousing, clinical trial management and CRM systems. And he sees Web services -- not enterprise application suites -- as the way to accomplish that.

Cubist does use Oracle’s 11i ERP suite for financials, human resources and some manufacturing functions, Schmitz says, but the implementation will stop short of sales-force automation. "It’s not that we’re dissatisfied with Oracle’s solution; it’s just that their sales solution doesn’t work for pharma-based sales," Schmitz says. "It’s more geared toward the sale of widgets." In contrast to sales efforts at a manufacturing company that sells products to individuals, Cubist’s sales staff tries to get hospitals excited about the potential benefits of its investigational drug Cidecin (for which Cubist filed a new drug application with the Food and Drug Administration at the end of 2002) -- from getting them involved in clinical trials to selling them the drug once it’s approved.