Move to third-party support - You could be from either the stable or the in-flux group, but you've taken a commodity view of ERP and want to contain costs. You're betting something will come along to replace today's maintenance-and-support model.

When Big Lots senior vice president and CIO John Zavada arrived at the closeout retailer two years ago, he looked at his PeopleSoft maintenance contract and realized that over the past five years, costs had nearly doubled.

The upgrade to version 8.3 of PeopleSoft was particularly painful, he recalls. It cost time and money and took close to a year to stabilize. As far as Zavada could tell, the only reason Big Lots upgraded was because its contract mandated it.

"I'm going through this pain just to maintain service?" Zavada asked PeopleSoft. "You're raking us over the coals for maintenance? No. We're looking for a new model."

The model was third-party support from TomorrowNow, which offered to support his current version of PeopleSoft for 10 years for less than the cost of sticking with his primary vendor. "We'd get no upgrades, but the benefits of those were minimal and always tied to the pain of implementation," says Zavada.

So far, he says, it's all worked out better than he expected. (Though, when SAP bought TomorrowNow in January, Zavada realized they'd be pitching him on their one-stop solutions just as Oracle would have.) He says his ROI is less than two years, and he's already saved so much money that if he decided in five years to start over with a new ERP system, he could. "I'm not sure if the industry understands that CIOs are thinking about this differently," Zavada says. "We're evaluating package by package and asking ourselves if there's any value at all in paying maintenance."

The third-party support option seems to be gaining a significant following because of what CIOs call maintenance's self-fulfilling prophecy: You pay maintenance to get support; the support contract mandates upgrades, which inevitably require more support. Joe O'Neill, CIO of Bridgestone Europe, partially relies on a third-party vendor for SAP support because, he says, "Monolithic situations are not good." Means at Decorative Concepts used to pay $US200,000 in annual maintenance to PeopleSoft. He says it would have gone up to $US220,000 with Oracle. He moved to independent support and now pays $US29,000.

The CIO who chooses third-party support views ERP as a commodity. His vision of the software future is that it won't be innovative, so upgrades aren't worth paying for. He's looking to codify business practices (which he figures won't change significantly), let them run and cut costs on maintenance.

Upgrade to Oracle Enterprise Platform - You're probably from the in-flux group, and you were planning to upgrade or switch anyway. You still believe there's innovation left in ERP.

When asked about the impact of the Oracle acquisition on his PeopleSoft ERP, Steve Sutherland, CIO of the commercial real estate firm CB Richard Ellis, first shot over an e-mail:

"1. PeopleSoft consulting should improve as Oracle consulting is more disciplined and professional.

2. Pricing should be more straightforward.

3. Long term there should be better integration between the functional apps and the database."

The CIO who would stay the course with Oracle is generally one in the middle of important upgrades, as Sutherland is. His PeopleSoft implementation was "stable in terms of purchase but not implementation. We're implementing HR now; we own financials and we bought CRM, and we'll start that soon". Simplicity is a virtue for CIOs who tack this way - one vendor, one licence.

"For a company like ours, I don't see the current model going away," Sutherland says. "If I look at my annual maintenance costs versus what I'd spend to bring the development in-house, I just couldn't do it. Absolutely, there's value in maintenance for me."

Not that Sutherland isn't monitoring the situation. "We didn't want Oracle to eliminate resources we thought were critical, so we told them which PeopleSoft people we wanted them to keep," says Sutherland. "And so far, they've put up strong support for us."

Some CIOs believe that the virtues of PeopleSoft - both its relatively friendly culture and its extremely solid HR and financial systems - will be lost in translation to Oracle. But Sutherland is not one of them. "When we've acquired companies," he says, "I've seen the strength that comes from all the cultures you inherit. The two of them can make one much better company."