Lexmark Abandons Oracle CRM Rollout

While Lexmark did not name Oracle as the vendor in question, sources close to Lexmark confirmed it was Oracle's CRM product.

"Oracle was a small part of a complex, highly customized implementation that Lexmark undertook," Oracle said in a statement. "We have many live customers on Oracle CRM."

Oracle CRM is just one component of the company's Oracle11i e-business suite.

Lexmark CFO Gary Morin, in a teleconference with financial analysts, said the company began the CRM project two and a half years ago. "The project was never implemented and was never part of our customer interaction," Morin said. "We decided to abandon it and write it off." The Lexington, Ky.-based vendor is moving forward with a series of "smaller, modular projects," he added.

Data Systems Worldwide, a longtime Oracle partner based in Woodland Hills, Calif., also abandoned an internal Oracle CRM implementation. "We were in the process of implementing Oracle [CRM here, and we aborted our implementation," said Mike Mogavero, executive vice president of Data Systems Worldwide.

Mogavero declined to specify the reason, saying his company hoped to come to a resolution with Oracle.

According to an active shareholder derivative lawsuit in San Mateo County, Calif., shareholders allege that Oracle has faced significant problems with more than a dozen large accounts, including BellSouth, Citigroup, JDS Uniphase, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola, as well as potential accounts including Fosters Ltd. of Australia. In many of those cases, Oracle rollouts of products, including its flagship database, have been plagued by thousands of bugs and glitches, the suit alleges. In those cases, some of the integration problems were so severe that Oracle had to dedicate "SWAT" teams of as many as 100 engineers to get the systems working, according to the lawsuit.

Meanwhile, the software maker's products have fared much better in the small and midsize part of the market, according to solution providers. The Oracle Small Business Suite, produced by NetLedger, a third-party company in which Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has a stake, is winning positive reviews from integrators. Ellison is also chairman of NetLedger.

"We actually focused our practice on it two years ago," said Mike Galloway, managing partner of AAppTech, a Bingham Farms, Mich.-based solution provider. "It's exactly what we believe the market is calling for," he said.