Are there any good vendors out there?
I am currently in my third big company and I have only come across one decent vendor during my time as a software developer. By decent I mean they had both a good product and had any sort of integrity. I have always tried to make it a point to point out the flaws during demos and presentations and have even on occasion intentionally hammered a vendor when I knew they were being shady in their answers.
I have pointed out a few times the flaws in one vendor that my current company’s CEO is just fascinated with, but we are currently getting ready to buy a product for doing their web publishing that is just downright behind the times and is going to be a major pain in the ass to work with. Well today I sent my email to the new VP, two project managers and my boss detailing everything that I discovered during the demo yesterday. I honestly don’t know what good it will do, but it just drives me crazy knowing that my company is going to spend a good 150k to 200k on this product that is just a piece a junk and no one seems to care.
I have not heard back yet but I expect that I will get the “Thanks for your input” and then basically be ignored. I’m sure I could go on and on about how companies never seem to listen to their own technical people or in a lot of cases don’t even consult them, but maybe I will save that for another day.
What is ironic is that myself and one other developer have been on the other side of the fence, working for a vendor and we both have similar experiences. From sitting in presentations where the outright lies were told to hearing customers get not quite truthful answers that we knew would lead to tons more money in ‘consulting’. I even had a boss that said that if he had thought about a feature or a customer inquired about a feature he would say we had that feature. Later he then build it if we needed to. This just baffled me. To me it was better to say “We don’t currently have that but if you want it we can build it” than to just say yes then rush to build it and hope it worked later.
Is there any integrity or even really good software from a major vendor? Surely it must be possible to have a well built quality product and not try to ring every single penny out of customer. Am I just being too idealistic?
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Comments
Your situation is very common. I have found a “Risk Assessment Report” helpful. It lists all of the problems with the system, both technical and business. For each item in the list include: id, title, description, impact (if it occurs), mitigation plan (if it occurs). The key here is to identify how your management can help reduce the risk of a deploying the product. Some of these risks can be addressed by management, such as having more support available to keep the system running, back up vendors chosen and evaluated, test environments built out etc. Also make sure that management signs off on which features can be dropped if they hit any critical risks. If your management refuses such a report, then when they conduct their “Lessons Learned” meeting after the project failure, give them a head start with your original RAR document.
Not a bad idea Shane. For the most part I think we are stuck with this vendor because they are being chosen for a larger system to the tune of well over a million dollars. The web publishing piece is only a fraction of that and the main argument is “it integrates with the rest of the system”.
I appreciate the comment!
I your email highlighting the deficiencies in the tool, did you go on to provide alternative tools which should be considered as alternatives, with your experience using those tools?
As for the comments concerning integrity, I would not tar all major vendors with this brush…. just their pre-sales teams. 
It is up to the purchaser to exercise due diligence, and ensure that a product will actually do what they want/need it to. Comparitive evaluations using simple proof of concepts tend to be the best way of working out whether a product will fit your needs.
However, that said, it might actually be cheaper to buy a product in some cases, see if it works, and if it doesn’t, write the cost off and try another.
Hi Lee, an evaluation did happen amongst several vendors, but the evals focused on another aspect which was more important to them than the web piece was. However they still have not purchased the web piece so I was hoping to head off a disaster, and waste of money, before hand.
Until today when I got my response I actually thought we were still evaluating this piece of the overall puzzle and thus I felt I needed to share the technical flaws I found. But it turns out it doesn’t matter (at least not at the moment) what anybody in IT thinks. I believe this is going to be a case of it won’t work out of the box and so they are going to pay the vendor tons of money to make it do what they want or have us pulling our hair out trying to make it do something it wasn’t designed to do.
You are correct in that not all vendors should be tarnished. Maybe I’ve just seen nothing but the bad. From IBM, RSA, Snapbridge, Cerner and a few that I’m surely forgetting, all over promise and under deliver. Or they deliver but are total junk, require far more hardware than what should be necessary (WebSphere comes to mind here), is overly complicated for what needs to be done (RSA and Snapbridge), etc. etc.
You make a good point about it being cheaper to buy and change later. That seems to be the mentality with a lot of organizations. I guess it baffles me that they will spend a couple hundred thousand on a product just to figure out it won’t work when someone (usually many someones) in their own company could — and usually tried — have told them it wasn’t going to work.
Anyway, thanks for the comment!
[...] As anticipated in my last post, I got the answer I was expecting, which was “…please approach in such a way. XYZ is our system, please remember that”. In other words, it doesn’t matter that you found a dozen reasons why this won’t work and doesn’t meet our needs, we are buying it anyway and you have to find a way to make it do what we want. [...]