After fourteen years, Tenrox has been through several economic turmoils and shocking world events such as 9/11. The credit crisis is the latest challenge we are all now facing together and it is unlike anything I have seen or heard of in a life time. It is simply amazing almost incomprehensible to me how a small group of mostly innocent but naive individuals, greedy mortgage brokers and deceitful investment firms can cause so much damage to the financial system and the real economy. The list of bank and company failures is truly astonishing. Incredibly, the world's entire financial system is at risk.

Take Lehman Brothers, a Wall Street icon that has been in business for many decades. A month or two before its collapse we got a call from a department head at Lehman who was looking for a project management tool to improve their internal project cost accounting. A few weeks into the sales process we got to the step of the credit check which is something we do when we do not know about the company we are dealing with. When our account executive asked me if a credit check is necessary on Lehman Brothers I smiled and said "Joe, this is Lehman Brothers. I am sure their credit is good."

A few days later Lehman had still not signed the agreement so Joe called to see what happened. His Lehman contact said "Did you read the newspaper this morning?" and Joe said "Yes but I wanted to see if the initiative will still proceed" … Lehman Brothers had collapsed!

We have seen a few project cancellations and delays in the last several months but so far on-demand project management software is still in very high demand in 2008.  Judging from our current pipeline we will close the year on a very strong note. I would not even venture to predict 2009 for any industry or market sector! … we just have to hope that we have looked into but stepped away from the abyss.