Thoughts on Vendor Selection
Sometimes I get asked interesting questions. The most recent was in a sector of eCommerce related to supply chain (I won't say which):
"I talked to 5 different vendors, the functionality seems the same. Yet 2-3 vendors were 5x the price of others. What's going on?"
If you've never done it before, it's not simple to evaluate platforms.
You often never want to be the largest person on your platform, unless you know you are taking a flyer to leapfrog something.
Just because someone in your sector of the industry isn't on it, doesn't mean it's not a fit.
just because someone can charge a lot, doesn't mean its a fit for you or that you are missing out on something.
In reality:
Enterprise vendor charges more because their costs to maintain are higher, and they have names on the platform you recognize and trust. That's the premium.
Very often, if you started the same business again from scratch today, those same business models would not function. The market would reject them. Needless to say, that's not a good sign.
That up-and-coming vendor could be acquired and later shut down in 3-5 years, are you prepared and OK with that?
Many people are in the set-it-and-forget-it school of infrastructure, which later becomes the "forgot to upgrade" school 5 years later.
Jason Greenwood had a lot of thoughts to share on this matter:
The main issue is that technology moves damn fast and yesterday's hot startup is tomorrow's dumpster fire (oh s*it, quick, find a new solution) OR potentially the next enterprise darling (with the attendant price increases that go with it). The key is agility and an integration architecture that is NOT RIGID. One that allows for the (relatively) easy unplugging/plugging in of old/new systems. That only really works when you are an API-led organization. That also necessarily means that ideally you are a SaaS-led organization, as SaaS platforms TEND to lend themselves more easily to systems integration, since by design you can only really integrate with them via API's. The biggest issue I encounter is technical debt and legacy investments still waiting for their ROI to arrive. It's a VERY hard discussion to tell a merchant, oh, that massive investment you made a few years ago, yeah, that one, it's worth almost nothing now and it's really holding you back because of X/Y/Z reasons. It's akin to telling someone their baby is ugly. BUT, as an outsider/consultant (one that's not trying to save their 'job'), it's a much easier discussion to have vs it coming from internally.
Did you catch that bit about the ugly baby? Jason’s on fire! And I tend to agree with him. Measure twice, cut once, but also: stay nimble.
