I'm sure most of us that have been involved in evaluating software will agree that its extremely difficult to figure out which among all those offerings from seeming endless number of vendors is the right one for your particular business and more importantly a good fit for the business given the direction its headed. It’s usually the great demo and sales talk combined with a very attractive starter deal that gets most of us. While a great demo may reflect the vendor's knowledge and understanding of the business you are in, it may just be that the vendor has invested more in fine tuning their demos for every vertical.
In fact what is most important are the following:
- Feature/function fit
- License cost
- Hosting cost
- Services cost
- Integration cost
- Training cost
- Compliance/Security cost
Cost must be quantified in terms of what you actually pay the vendor and what you actually spend internally deploying and using it. While this may all seem too obvious, it’s amazing how we get sold on one or the other and completely ignore the overall picture. While a product may have all the bells and whistles, the question really is whether those are features your users need. Integration is often an overlooked area while purchasing software. Simply asking how you do integration is not sufficient. Most software vendors can answer that question. The real question is how much integration you foresee for your business going forward. If you do expect a lot of integration, you may want to have your data as close as possible so that you can have complete control on the data/APIs and make it available to applications that need that data. Integration is always expensive when you change requirements and add functionality in the app that sends the data or receives the data. You may spend almost nothing on the license but if integration costs are high you are probably going down the wrong path.
Feature/function fit is sometimes highly overrated. Again, don't believe what the vendor tells you. They always know that under certain conditions, the feature works but it my not work for all the conditions that are actually important for you. So, nothing beats trying out something and then making that assessment. You not only get to play with the software but you get to see the bugs and caveats which the sales folks conveniently never share with you. Open Source software is perfect if you want to try out something before deciding to buy it. Some of the On-Demand apps that are now available are truly amazing when it comes to value - most of them let you test drive before you sign up.
Last but not the least, be practical. Most of the established products have been around a while and those vendors are unlikely to make major improvements. They have long release cycles. Look at what is out there, try out some of the newer products and make an independent decision on what is best for your business. There is a lot of software/hardware being developed, faster, cheaper and better every day. Do your homework and even better, listen to folks who have used the product or evaluated it in the past.
Finally, if you believe that you should use software only from the established players such as Oracle, SAP or Microsoft, then you better be working for a $1 Billion plus company or one that is rapidly headed in that direction - they are safe bets and probably will do the job if you have deep pockets and resources to spare!
