Instead, Clow and his team decided to invest more than $1 million in Alphablox, a privately held, 100-employee business intelligence application vendor based in Mountain View, Calif. Clow found that Alphablox offered a Web-based analytics system capable of connecting the data housed in the existing Siebel systems with the bank's profit and loss data in a way that would allow employees to analyze each banking customer's profitability. "We decided it was easier to use Alphablox than to integrate those different Siebel systems implementations," Clow says.

Clow believes that big CRM vendors are less than valuable to CIOs outside their core competencies (which in Siebel's case, according to Clow, is sales-force automation), though the pressure is often there from the business side to stick with the same vendor. "From a business perspective, particularly in a large global conglomerate, once people have had success with a certain product, contracts are signed and discounts offered, it often becomes simpler to stick with the same vendor even if it isn't the best solution," Clow explains. "But there's a point of diminishing return as you continue to invest in a single vendor beyond their sweet spot."

Siebel admits that although its Inquire module could have provided visibility into profitability, it could not have delivered the kind of profitability engine Deutsche Bank required. "It wasn't a core capability or function of that solution," says David Carter, general manager of Siebel Finance in San Mateo, Calif. "You can always write additional code to make it work, but it wasn't an exact fit."

Last summer, Clow joined New York City-based Citi Cards as vice president of technology architecture and strategy. The credit card company, Clow explains, has no CRM suite but is about to close on a large deal with a small customer data model company to handle customer management. "We needed to add tools around contact management, but we decided to look at small, on-the-cusp types of companies, like small e-mail companies or business performance software vendors," says Clow. Citi Cards will be investing tens of millions of dollars on the customer management project on the assumption that it will pay for itself in less than a year - something few big CRM suites can claim. Smaller vendors are now providing best-of-breed functionality and open architecture that can easily integrate with other solutions- including CRM suites - using standards like J2EE or simple object access protocol, says Clow.

Christensen was facing a similar situation at Fleet when she discovered that the bank would have had to upgrade the entire organization to Siebel 7.0 in order to use the vendor's lead management tool. And Fleet had greatly customized the earlier release, making the upgrade option an expensive proposition. In contrast, an application processing interface was all that was required to connect the MarketSoft point application to the existing Siebel systems package.