Cisco also had reason to believe that Oracle was particularly motivated to make the project a success.
Pond provided his impression of Oracle’s situation: “Oracle wanted this win badly. We ended up
getting a super deal. There are, however, a lot of strings attached. We do references, allow site visits
and in general talk to many companies that are involved in making this decision.” The Cisco project
would be the first major implementation of a new release of the Oracle ERP product. Oracle was
touting the new version as having major improvements in support of manufacturing. A successful
implementation at Cisco would launch the new release on a very favorable trajectory.