The So Called OOB Experience

Cisco uses Salesforce.com. Although I work in Cisco IT, I don't know much about that project at all apart from that it exists. Today CNET has an article about it that I quote here:

Further, JMP contends that Cisco's IT department has "struggled to integrate these tools with a hosted application and is questioning the logic of a having such a heavily customized hosted application."

Well, shall we give up on the so called OOB (out of box, or is it rather out of body?) experience already? The handful of ERP/CRM implementations that I have seen, whether Oracle, Siebel or Salesforce.com, are all heavily customized. You see constant struggles between the vendor (who says no customization or else you are on your own) and the customer. Cornerstone Framework's customization feature were designed to ease that pain and let both parties to settle on a practical middle ground: yes, you can customize because it's easy and can be preserved over upgrades.