White Papers Is It Time to Replace Your E/CTRM? | Page 2

A ComTechAdvisory Whitepaper
Is It Time to Replace Your E/CTRM?
INTRODUCTION
Historically, the E/CTRM replacement market has been quite small and relatively slow. There
simply hasn’t been so many replacements and where replacements of E/CTRM solutions have
taken place, it had usually been because of a truly compelling need. Usually, that reason would
be that the vendor had repeatedly and persistently failed to deliver the requirements, or support
the E/CTRM installed, and usually, this would be because the vendor had been acquired, gone
out of business or had dropped support of the product.
The reality was that replacements were always extremely
difficult to do, meaning that users would put up with
almost anything rather than go through a replacement
in order to avoid having to select another product and
vendor. The risk is always that this will be no better than
the original and will cost of lot of time and money to do
it along with all of the business disruption. The devil you
know is better than the devil you don’t. Other reasons
include,
• For those who had made the original choice,
admission that it was a poor choice could be a
career-limiting move and reflect on them poorly,
• It always seems as if it is safer, less risky and less
costly to work with something you have no matter
how poor it may be than start all over again and
anyway “we know the supplier and have a relationship
in place with them”,
• Sometimes, the sunk cost of investment into the
existing legacy, interfaces, user training and so forth
is simply too large.
However, E/CTRM is now well in its third decade as
a software category. Much has changed over those
years in terms of needs and technology. We now see a
developing and growing replacement market emerging
that will only grow in the coming years. There are a
number of compelling reasons why the replacement
market is set to grow.
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