Forum Post: RE: Build vs buy (OT??)

[Thomas Mercer-Hursh]

Quite some years back I had an interesting experience with one of my customers. They were running my ERP application and I had downsized to a one person company so there was a period where I was busy with some other projects and wasn't perhaps as responsive as they wished I would be. So, without telling me, the CFO scouted around for another package and picked one that was considered the top of the line for the publishing industry (they were a publisher). I got informed after the contract was signed and deposits paid and they contracted me to assist with the data migration. Well, as we attempted to go through the mapping from my data structure to theirs, it became apparent that moving would mean the loss of massive amounts of data because my system was far richer than theirs. Eventually this was so bad that they cancelled the contract at substantial loss. They still had the same concern, so they contracted with me to build a requirements document so that they could properly evaluate another system before signing the contract. Not everything in the requirements document was in my system since it included the improvements which they were looking for, but my software did a good 95% of what was in the document. They sent that around and asked for bids. Not a single publishing package was willing to respond. They only responses at all were from major ERP solutions like Oracle Financials and PeopleSoft and those were very tentative. Oracle was the only one who pursued it at all and they came up with a rough estimate of $2M in modifications on top of the expensive license cost. So, we had a little negotiation and they and I committed to a body of work and a rough time schedule and we went happily off into the future until they were bought by Wiley, who, of course, had their own software. Again I was contracted to do the data migration, but only for the royalty contracts piece since the rest was irrelevant. Again there was substantial loss of data and capability, but they did it anyway.

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