Pete Solvik joined Cisco in January 1993 a s 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 a nd have higher
redundancy but it will still be a package for $300 million companies and we’re a $1 billion
dollar company.”
Solvik’s initial inclination was to avoid an ERP solution. Instead, he planned to let each functional
area make its own decision regarding the application and timing of its move. Keeping with Cisco’s
strong tradition of standardization, however, all functional areas would be required to use common
architecture and databases. This approach was consistent with the organizational and budgetary
structures that Solvik had installed upon his arrival. Solvik felt strongly that budgetary decisions on
IT expenditures be made by functional areas while the IT organization reported directly to him.
Solvik’s objection to ERP solutions was also born out of concerns about the types of “mega-projects”
that ERP implementations often became