Bob Vesely had a vision several years back of what he wanted to be able to do with the planning and budgeting software he would purchase for Advantage Sales & Marketing LLC. Advantage is a sales and marketing agency that represents 1,200 manufacturers and moves about $35 billion worth of their products each year, and Vesely, as its CFO and executive vice president, was looking to do much more than just getting away from spreadsheets.

Vesely wanted a system that could give his executives a so-called real-time snapshot of how the company was performing. That meant using the Web to make the system and its information accessible to all of Advantage's 100 offices across the country. In Vesely's mind, it also required linking the software with other company data, and not necessarily financial data.

When Vesely had this vision, the scandals with Enron, WorldCom and Tyco had not happened yet, and Sarbanes and Oxley probably hadn't even had their first conversation on corporate governance. On Vesely's part, it was pure prescience.