Compliance is definitely a big driver of this. One fundamental [Sarbanes-Oxley requirement] is, if it is a public company, to report to Wall Street how many customers you have; because people are making investment decisions as to whether your customer base is going up or down. If you have no idea how many customers you have because you have acquired different companies, then you potentially have a compliance issue there. |
In late 2003, those big names, Siebel, Oracle, SAP, they all decided over a period of months that the previous story of solving this totally with their suites was really not going to fly anymore and they needed an additional approach … which was to propose an e-central CDI system. |
It's pretty clear that the amount of liability is going to be in the billions. |
They still have further to go in terms of having sort of no-risk or minimal-risk with implementation. These people are still learning and are still finding out the limits and the boundaries of some of these products. |
You've got obligations, not quite on the same level as the CFO going to jail if they run afoul of Sarbanes-Oxley. But if you are not complying with some of the data privacy regulations these days, the company is potentially going to get fined. It's going be … very negative for PR and company branding. |