Virtual Resume: Gap, Inc. Direct
Gap, Inc. Direct is the e-commerce division of Gap, Inc., responsible for the e-commerce sites of Gap, which at that point included Gap, Old Navy, and Banana Republic. Toby Lenk, one of the earliest cautionary Internet startup tales with eToys, had been hired as CEO of Gap, Inc., Direct to retool their e-commerce platform. I remember to my horror seeing that Banana Republic was using Microsoft's Commerce Server as their e-commerce and merchandising platform at the time; it was a terrible platform for one of the top 10 apparel brands in the world, never mind $20,000 per CPU for the Enterprise Edition?! Good gravy.
Regardless, even though he had burned eToys to the ground trying to build a standalone world-class fulfillment infrastructure for online toy sales, Toby still felt any serious player in e-commerce had to build and own their own "stack" and hardware (this was pre-cloud, and even mobile, really; I remember streaming Red Sox radio with a Palm Treo for my work commute over the Bay Bridge).
We ran a bake-off between the two classic software alternatives to determine which direction the new platform would take: build vs. buy. The "buy" option would have been ATG (for the surprisingly named ATG)