Pete Solvik joined Cisco in January 1993 as the company’s CIO. At the time, Cisco was a $500
million company running a UNIX-based software package to support its core transaction processing.
The functional areas supported by the package included financial, manufacturing, and order entry
systems. Cisco was “far and away” the biggest customer of the software vendor that supported the
application.3 Solvik’s experience and the company’s significant growth prospects convinced him that
Cisco needed a change.
We wanted to grow to $5 billion-plus. The application didn't provide the degree of
redundancy, reliability, and maintainability we needed. We weren't able to make changes to
the application to meet our business needs anymore. It had become too much spaghetti, too
customized. The software vendor did offer [an upgraded version], but when we looked at it
we thought “by the time we’re done our systems will be more reliable and have higher
redundancy but it will still be a package for $300 million companies and we’re a $1 billion
dollar company.”