But New York-based Verizion, the nation's largest local telephone company, must still separate its retail and wholesale operations into distinct units, each with its own accounting and customer service operations.

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After that, customers find themselves locked into years of expensive software purchases, tailor-made for each customer by the hardware maker or its associates.

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Individual customers and companies became anonymized into aggregate profiles and scenarios, rather than enabling employees to collaborate on specific issues of each customer.

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