Situation:
A new major prescription drug was coming to market. The IT Director and Brand Manager needed to find a solution to host the website that could support the traffic generated by a multi-million dollar ad campaign. The process for vendor selection took nearly nine months and included 'major' hosting firms such as IBM. 60 days before the scheduled site launch that was to coincide with the debut of the marketing campaign, the selected firm indicated that launch would take three months. This was a major threat to millions of dollars already spent on media placement.

A major pharmaceutical company's brand manager was using an advertising agency to build a portal website targeted to consumers to learn about diabetes. The advertising agency had limited technology capabilities and were using another 3rd party technology firm to develop the back-end code that would make the site work. This technical development was being done using the firm's proprietary software. The site worked properly, but the proprietary software was very expensive to use. Additionally, the brand manager was finding that communication with the technologists was inefficient and site changes and fixes were taking days and weeks for resolution. At one point, the site even went down during a major promotion and the technology firm took nearly a week to respond to the problem, costing the pharmaceutical brand awareness and esteem as well as wasting marketing dollars.