Like other success stories with a twist, ING Vysya Life's story was no different. Just when Subramanian and his team were finding their feet with the new system, they were hit by a storm in the form of a software giant. YASU Technologies was bought over by SAP, leaving ING Vysya Life in a lurch.

There was an initial wave of frustration. As a consequence of the acquisition, the senior team at YASU was replaced and they could not see the company through the implementation. Everybody was anxious that this could hamper the project. At this nascent stage, sturdy support from its implementation partner was of paramount importance. This had an adverse effect on the go-live date of the project.

"We wanted the system to be up and running by December 2007. But it got postponed to March because we did not get support from our partners. We had to reschedule the project and delay the go-live by three months. We would have had large incentive schemes running on the system during the peak period of January, February and March. The fact that we could not do that was a small setback because then we had to wait for the next peak period," says Subramanian.

Another cause of concern was the fact that ING Vysya Life had no industry parallels or benchmarks that they could follow, as the project was unique.

The company did not have a precedent to show its end users. "We could not show them an example of a company where this kind of an approach had been adopted so we could not show them how it would work. We had to show them some small prototypes how the rules engine would work, how the rules would be defined, how easy it would be for them to define the rules," says Subramanian. At the same time the company wasn't sure if SAP would support them. With so many issues mounting on him, Subramanian was down but not out.