Speed matters

"One of the biggest reasons people are willing to go to small vendors today is, the risk associated with having a project fail is much smaller financially," explains Barron. "With implementations involving large enterprise software vendors, a lot of times you don't understand if you failed until you're a year and a half into the project. Because it has so many intricacies and takes so much collaboration between IT groups, it can take four months to gear up for the project, then seven months to implement, and by then it has taken a lot of money."

In comparison, "with software from smaller vendors, it can take 20% to 40% less time to implement, and if it works, it could save you between three and eight times as much," Barron adds.

The catch, of course, is that it doesn't always work. But even failing seems to be cheaper than going with the big guys.

For example, CPS Energy bought a $250,000 business process modeling application that Barron says would have cost about $3 million had he purchased a similar system from SAP or Oracle Corp. Although it was a well-designed piece of software, the lower-cost package didn't work out because it didn't easily interface with CPS Energy's installed MQSeries middleware and would have cost another $250,000 to customize.

"In the end, it didn't work the way we needed it to work, but it cost $500,000, not $3 million," Barron says.

But lower cost is just one of many reasons users cite for turning to smaller, lighter, less-expensive technologies. Much of the newer, consumer-oriented Web 2.0 technology is also faster and far more effective in fostering communication and collaboration, which is a primary goal for organizations with increasingly dispersed workforces. The U.S. Department of Defense, for example, has adopted both Web-based chat and wikis as standard communication tools, even in battle.

"We have tactical war commanders who use small chat rooms on the battlefield, and we're leveraging wikis to enable us to more quickly develop shared intelligence on a particular situation or event," says Dave Mihelcic, chief technology officer at the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA).

Mihelcic says the DOD also has "free and ready access" to Intellipedia, an online system for collaborative data sharing that was developed and is used by the U.S. intelligence community. The system consists of multiple wikis used by individuals with appropriate clearances from more than a dozen agencies and national security organizations, including combatant commands.