The dot-com revolution has left few lasting impressions as significant as the hosted-software phenomena. The success of solutions such as Salesforce.com has given organizations a good reason to evaluate hosted offerings when making CRM purchasing decisions.

However, there remain many compelling reasons that it is in the best interest of organizations -- especially midmarket companies, with 50 to 600 employees -- to opt for an on-premise CRM offering. Ironically, one of the key benefits of hosted solutions -- the incorporation of proven best practices -- may make this option less of a fit for more complex organizations. Typically, as organizations mature, they tend to develop their own best practices, which make them successful and unique. This is a key reason that a one-size-fits-all approach to customer and financial-management solutions has rarely worked for the mid to upper midmarket customer.

These organizations tend to have rapidly changing business processes -- along with a host of legacy applications or third-party solutions that need to be integrated with the hosted solution.

On-premise solutions make it simpler for customers to integrate their own proven business processes, procedures, data and analytical solutions in the applications, thereby ensuring a better fit with their business.

Many hosted-software providers guarantee that customers can be up and running in 90 days; this is a compelling claim given that industry standards for implementing complex business systems ranges from months to years. There are two common challenges with this streamlined approach.

First, the "quick start" implementation generally leaves little room for real configuration of the system and may even exclude common difficult tasks, such as converting your data from your existing solution.