With the requirements in hand and vendors at the ready, Singh suffered some sticker shock. "Very rapidly we came to the conclusion that the amount of capital required to invest in those systems was going to be prohibitive to us," Singh says. "We'd rather divert that amount of capital into our transformational product sets instead of spending it on IT or HR."

Into the vendor discussions soon entered Workday, the on-demand ERP vendor cofounded by Dave Duffield, who had himself founded ERP juggernaut PeopleSoft in 1987. "Obviously, Workday had a great pedigree," Singh says of his first impressions. (Workday's other founder is Aneel Bhusri, who had been at PeopleSoft since 1993. For a profile of Workday, see "Can Two Legacy ERP Guys Get IT Executives to Buy into On-Demand Applications?")

Duffield was well aware of the competition. The plan he and Bhusri constructed in order to win the deal involved three things, he says via e-mail: "Demonstrating we could deliver a modern solution that would support their global HR operation; establishing a SaaS model that delivered significant cost savings; and then building a trusted partnership between our organizations."

"Going with a Startup Is Always a Little Bit of a Risk"

Chiquita would be, by far, Workday's largest implementation to date. Chiquita had dipped its toes in some SaaS applications, Singh says, but "we were not very adept when we started this process." Therefore, Singh and the senior management team had plenty of questions for Workday, beyond what they would have asked a Tier 1 on-premise vendor, such as about the vendor's application roadmaps, multiple language capabilities and customization options.