When the Carlyle Group went to upgrade its ERP system, it would have had to hire at least six new IT pros to meet its stringent, round-the-clock requirements. Instead, it opted for a hosted solution, which meant less investment in building and maintaining the system in addition to maintaining head count, reports Jennifer Lawinski at CIOInsight.

The Carlyle Group decided to deploy Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) PeopleSoft Enterprise and Hyperion Performance Management applications throughout its sites worldwide, and it gave itself just one year for the upgrade. It ended up choosing Dell Services to host the system.  

"From the very beginning, I had decided I did not want to hire the expertise necessary for me to build that environment internally," said David Roth, CIO for the Carlyle Group. "So we went through a fairly structured RFP process to identify and select a managed service provider that had expertise in managing PeopleSoft environments."

The hosting provider that the company needed would likely have a combination of on-shore and off-shore resources capable of providing round-the-clock management, Roth said. It would also have to meet strict SLAs and disaster recovery requirements. "We're pretty tough on vendors," he said. "We spend a lot of time going through terms and conditions making sure that we are protected against loss of confidentiality and because our data is so critical to us."

Roth offers three tips for other CIOs considering moving to hosted ERP. First, it doesn't always make sense to go with the least expensive option because it may not meet all of your needs. Second, find vendors who are detail-oriented and willing to answer questions throughout the process. "We put together an RFP with lots of specific questions and were looking for fairly detailed answers and Dell was very careful to answer the questions in the RFP," Roth said. "They were very responsive. Some of the other vendors were very unresponsive... and didn't answer the questions adequately."

Finally, be sure to get feedback from existing customer references. The level of enthusiasm that is displayed will say a lot about the service.

For more:
- see Jennifer Lawinski's article at CIOInsight

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