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The new realities: enterprise apps buyers at Decipher, Cybex International, and Binney & Smith exemplify today's pragmatism. (The business of business apps).

Article Excerpt
Enterprise software in transition

PART 1 OF A 3-PART SERIES

Sean Ellis is representative of the oft-burned information technology (IT) executive. "At every company where I've ever worked, I've had vendors over-promise, under-deliver and over-bill," says the vice president of information technology (IT) for Decipher, a Norfolk, Va.-based company that produces board games and other entertainment-related products. "I previously worked at a company that spent years putting in a very expensive Tier 1 ERP [enterprise resources planning] solution at 14 sites in seven states. Five of those sites refused to use it because it didn't work the way it was supposed to.

"Then, prior to my arrival here, the company had gone through four full implementations of the same solution, using four different consulting companies," Ellis continues. "Still, it never worked the way the consultants and account managers promised it would."

Most observers say a number of factors came together to inflate and then deflate the enterprise applications market over the past three years. In the heady boom years of the late 1990s, C-level executives under pressure to instantly turn their companies into e-Businesses receptively met vendor promises. Add in the boost in IT spending attributable to the Year 2000 computer bug, and you have a market that perhaps too willingly jumped into major implementations of enterprise software.

"Before, there was too much hype-buying," says Dwight Klappich, a research director with Stamford, Conn.-based analyst firm META Group. "Manufacturers thought that if they didn't jump to some new technology or new solution immediately, it was going to be too late."

As things turned out, few industries went the way of bookselling and Amazon, and as the dot-corn and high-tech sectors quickly cooled,...