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“Validate before you Buy”
By Shawn Ennis - 6/13/2005

OpenWater recently ran into a situation that, unfortunately, is becoming an all too common occurrence. The customer had a need to manage their optical infrastructure. After doing some research on the internet they determined who the major players are. Based upon reading vendor marketing materials and meeting with the various business development teams they were able to determine the solution that they wanted to proceed forward with. Now if you’ve been through the trenches in this industry, then you may understand that vendor marketing documents and business development personnel are not necessarily solely motivated to help you solve your problems. It might even be fair to say that they are strongly driven to accomplish one major objective – reaching their quota.

Now all through this process the customer never engaged with a services company. They never talked to anyone who had deployed the software before. They never engaged an objective third party to validate the vendors claims. They never stopped for a minute to consider that the following statement from the software vendor might not have been entirely accurate, “if you just buy our software, then you will find that it solves all of your problems.” Many organizations still like to believe that there is a magic software pill out there that you can swallow to cure what ails you.

Nothing can replace the diligence and discovery of going through a requirements analysis, developing a selection criteria, and completing a vendor comparison matrix. All of this was placed on the back burner to accommodate a perceived time savings in the project by reducing the transaction speed on the front end. One step forward and two steps back is clearly not what this customer was shooting for; yet this is a frequent occurrence in the world of Enterprise Technology Management (ETM). Have we all forgotten the lessons of CA and Metasolv?

So how did we get involved? OpenWater was engaged after the software was purchased to implement the solution that the software manufacturer and the customer developed together. On our first week on the project we quickly came to the realization that the sold software will not work in the customer’s environment. The software did not support the hardware type and firmware version running in production at the clients’ organization.

A project that was supposed to be completed in three weeks will now take three months to hopefully complete. The customer is now reeling. How could this have happened? Why did we not know? New software is always tempting, but it typically hasn’t been put through the paces yet. How stable is it? What is the depth of platform support? It is always best to have an advocate with real-world knowledge, experience and connections to get the right solution that delivers the greatest value with the least amount of risk possible.

All of this could have been easily mitigated if the customer would have engaged a qualified services organization to assist or help them validate their decision. Budget is too much a valuable commodity to make this mistake.