'One million dollars!'

Christian Crumlish

Dylan Tweney hails The Death of the $1 Million Software Package in his latest Business 2.0 column:

Back in the late 1990s, a software salesman could look you in the eye and say with a straight face that his company's enterprise system would cost you $1 million. Mercifully, those days are over.

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"Companies are looking around and saying, 'OK, I bought all this stuff, how do I make it work together?'" says Yankee's Dominy. If companies are still buying from ERP and SCM vendors, they're more likely to purchase smaller applications that have a clear, quick return on investment, such as software for managing a fleet of delivery vehicles, rather than full-blown, end-to-end systems. "Money is going into IT administration and management (including data center integration) and application integration," agrees George Zachary, a general partner at venture capital firm Mohr Davidow. "Money is going very slowly into business-process-oriented IT (such as CRM)."