The pain is easing for people like Ivan Cole, whose firm sells three of the Microsoft accounting software lines. "We have been on a roller coaster," says Cole, owner of New York City-based Cole Systems. The company rode the e-business bubble up and down. In 1999, the firm was honored by Great Plains for Overall Sales Achievement. The next year, Great Plains cited it for eBusiness excellence and Cole was ramping up its staff to build Web stores. The firm expanded to as much as $15 million in annual revenue. But it got back to basics in the accounting software market, shrinking to about $6 million last year. Not only did the Web hype subside, but as business tanked, deals got smaller and clients adopted a do-it-yourself attitude when they could. "They still use our services to help them implement systems. But on networking systems, they've chosen to do their own Exchange Server implementation," he says.
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