Should You Buy or Rent?

by Stephen J. Andriole

I recently talked to a CIO who successfully deployed a monster enterprise resource planning (ERP) system across three continents. It all went amazingly well -- but it cost an arm and a leg. I then asked another CIO friend of mine about how his customer relationship management (CRM) application deployment went, and the results were not as successful. In fact, it was a nightmare. I needed a tiebreaker, so I called yet another CIO and asked about how her network and systems management framework implementation was going but she hedged, claiming that it was too early to tell and that in a year or so she'd have a better idea about whether or not it was working. I scored that as a miss.