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.