At the weekend, I found myself walking past Chelsea and Westminster Hospital

To some, it’s a landmark famous for its appearance in the 1998 rom-com Sliding Doors

To me, it’s the backdrop of a "sliding door" moment in my own career, a place where I once lost a deal, only to win it back two years later after the original ERP vendor went bust

Link to my blog here

More importantly, that location reminds me of a shift in the Oracle ERP world that transformed a desperate workaround into a global industry standard

The Implementation Crisis

Back in the 1990s, I was working for an Oracle partner

In that world, delivery was everything

Our technical teams were adamant: for an implementation to succeed, the customer needed a robust in-house technical staff

Of course, while the shift from on-premise to the Cloud has changed the nature of those roles today, the fundamental need for expertise remains

This particular client, however, hadn't hired a single technical person

Paying for top-tier talent in London was, and still is, eye-wateringly expensive

The implementation manager eventually called me, giving me a fair bit of stick for "selling a dream" without setting expectations

Since the client had no one to run the system, we were stuck in a standoff: we had to backfill the roles, but nobody wanted to foot the bill

(I should point out that I had explained this to the client, I'm guessing they just hoped the problem would just go away)

A Radical Solution

I’m not sure who exactly sparked the flame, but the implementation manager and hit on an idea that was radical for the 90s: selling the services of our technical team "down a wire."

Today, remote support is the oxygen of the tech industry, after all that is was software as a service, (SaaS) or cloud gives you

In the mid-90s, suggesting that a team could manage an ERP system remotely was revolutionary

The client went for it and we sold it as an upsell and it became a standard product and for a while a unique selling point (USP) especially in UK Public Sector

By 2001, I had leaned so far into this concept that I became the Sales Director for a startup Oracle partner dedicated entirely to this "Managed Service" model, a unique proposition at the time

Conclusion

It makes me smile when I look at the Oracle ecosystem today

What began as a frantic solution to a staffing crisis at Chelsea and Westminster has become "table stakes." 

Every partner now boasts a Managed Service wing, but few remember when "remote delivery" was a daring gamble rather than a line item on a contract

I mention this because we still come across so many customer challenges today

Every "issue" is essentially a sliding door, a hidden opportunity to innovate and offer even better service