Enterprise Software Research

---

You’ve been tasked to compare software products and to come up with a decisive, strong recommendation on whether your company should proceed with a particular software solution.  Get it right, you can save your company money while figuring out how to do things better, and maybe you can become a Hero.  Get it wrong, wind up with professional egg on your face and worst possible outcome, lose your job if your recommendations are catastrophic.  At the very least, one result is a clear feather in your cap while the other represents a stain that you cannot wash out.  Nonetheless, this job is an important one and one that you should take seriously.  For small business, mid-sized, or large enterprise, selecting the right software product and vendor can help propel your business forward or have long term negative ramifications.  In your evaluation, you may be leading a small team of expert selectors or be the sole person on the hook, either way, it is a big call.

One of the important aspects to recognize early in the process is your personal or perhaps professional bias towards a particular vendor or product.  You may have deep vendor relationships or experience with a product that you used in the past and have obvious reasons to include it in your evaluation.  That said, you certainly should also think about the competitive field of similar products. Have they caught up and surpassed your tried-and-true solution?  Do you know what is best for your current computing environment?  Odds are that your company is operating in an ever-changing hybrid, multi-cloud environment.  Are you in an era of expanding budgets (not likely) with an organization willing to accept risk of failure or are you in a staring contest with evil budget donkeys every time you put in a purchase request?

In a perfect world, you could perform a straight feature/function comparison and select an obvious winner.  At the onset, you’ll probably conduct a paper study of leading vendors and whittle the competitive field down to the top 3 to 5.  It has become commonplace for selectors to sit through hour long presentations of your top tier choices and determine who you would like to have in for your version of a formal product bake off.  Once you have the results of your Proof of Concept’s, you’ll probably prepare a presentation to brief your executive team with the goal of moving forward with your selected vendor.  Most product buys are far more complex than just a straight up feature/function shoot-out that are by design inherently biased towards pre-favored vendors and their solutions.

An important factor to consider that will help minimize your downside risk is whether a product has been successful in your market vertical, with one of your competitors and has met industry specific standards and regulations. As a buyer, you can take advantage of the pioneers before you that may have their face down in the dirt with arrows in their back.  You can experience the same fateful outcome when you lean into new unproven software solutions, there is always the temptation of higher upside and usually greater downside.  A proven winner at one or more of your day-to-day competitors may be the best choice for you, especially if the software is out of the public eye or your internal business users and is of the not-so-sexy nature common to more back end, infrastructure-based solutions.  

One of the key factors in any evaluation is the two-way learning curve for your internal and external clients.  One, how easy to implement and understand will the software be on your user base and your clients?  Are you going to cause disruptions to your business? Even temporary ones can be quite painful (especially if it is making your phone blow up) not to mention time consuming.  Those situations will publicly reflect negatively on the person or team that disrupted the business.  It is a hat that no one wants to wear. Equally important is the load that deploying new technology is on your infrastructure and importantly, your engineering teams.  Most likely, your engineering teams are already stretched thin, a common mode of operation in most IT shops.  Introducing new technologies to a maxed-out team usually equates to more investments in training, a steep new product learning curve, and overall slower productivity.  

Ease of adoption and improving the overall end user experience, especially if it is customer facing, is usually one of the main goals of any software related project.  It is not only the ease of adoption, which is critical and will help establish positive momentum, but a user experience that improves an outdated process, adapts to current environments, saves a few bucks and generally makes life easier.  The ease of adoption for new solutions is an important consideration, difficult to put solidly as a check marked box in the evaluation process but must be thoroughly investigated and an important factor in your decision rationale.  This factor has to be validated outside the typical internally driven vendor/product selection process by interviewing current users (not incentivized stooges), industry colleagues, and even message boards (read social media).  The one caveat here is an obvious one, but with social media’s general sea of negativity, you have to take everything with a grain of salt or ten.  However, you can pick up on some common themes if you wade through the seemingly endless sea of negativity.  Your proposed product set should have a solid record of product enhancements, a closely followed maintenance schedule and a proven methodology for bug fixes.  Critical to any successful software implementation, large or small, is the access and performance of the customer service teams.  Do you have 24x7x365 support?  Once you call the support hotlines, are the teams responsive? Does your new (or existing) vendor have a solid track record of lightning-fast product defect escalations and resolutions?  As you are performing your outside investigation, are you able to see how your prospective vendor responds when things go wrong?  In the software world, projects performing poorly is a given.  How a company responds is the real variable, and some are better than others.

A few words ago, we touched on the topic of paid stooges.  Most can guess where we are headed, but it bears discussing, nonetheless.  We are referring to the popular paid services that we will not mention by name.  The research of these firms is a study in conflict of interests.  Hats off to them for setting up a great business model. The product companies pay a fee for the research firms to evaluate them and include them in their published studies. And the more the product company pays, the more it is covered.  Normally, this coverage is conducted in a quite favorable light.  This is a great business model because the evaluating firms that evaluate and select solutions also pay the research companies for their advice.  Companies can pay a base level subscription up to high level analysis from one of these firms that can top out to essentially outsourcing your entire evaluation process to one of these research firms.  All in all, given the inherent conflicts and bias built into the models of these firms, their research tends to be more accurate than not although it will more likely accentuate the positive attributes of a favored solution rather than harp on apparent deficiencies.  At the end of the day though, these firms are usually nothing more than a CYA mechanism for selectors if a new software project goes downhill or fails.

Cybersecurity considerations are probably either a separate discussion or a separate set of discussions with any software evaluation process.  Let’s hit on some of the top aspects.  Does the new software project and products make my company safer or more vulnerable to attack?  How will we integrate a new software product into our security posture/stack?  Is our CISO a friend or foe of the technology we are evaluating?  The CISO used to be a voice in the room, but in many cases now, can be the voice of doom preventing new gear from getting on to networks. There are many more things to consider, but if your company has a separate security team, it is better to involve them as early in the process as you possibly you can to understand and work through their objections.  

Software licensing and pricing can have a large impact on the vendor selection process, depending on an organization’s spending outlook and the business lifecycle we mentioned at the top.  In some firms, the finance team seems to nearly always win out when going head-to-head with the technology teams.  The selection process can come down to the least technically acceptable solution at the lowest price.  How flexible is your chosen vendor’s licensing plan?  Do they have an established track record with your company?  If not, how willing are they to negotiate customized terms and conditions that meet the parameters of your organization.  How “locked in” will your organization be if you make a certain selection?  Thinking of course, from both a pricing perspective and from a technology point of view as well.  Over time, consuming companies generally want to limit the overall number of vendors that they deal with, especially true in large technology shops, but they also want the flexibility to move and change when the circumstances dictate.  

Now that you’ve gone through your analysis, determined how well a product performs, how it operates and integrates into your current technology stack, identified the acceptable deployment risks and found acceptable pricing and licensing, how do you move forward?  Assuming you will need buy-in from your executive teams, it is always a safer bet to have a primary solution along with a couple of runner ups just in case.  Make a recommendation based on a robust set of pros and cons of each solution and recommend a winner.  Be open to criticism, be prepared to defend your choice, and in some cases, be prepared to accept one of your runner ups.  Lastly, as you plan and move into your pilot phase, still keep your backup(s) on hot standby.  Remember, a product failure could lead to very real career challenges while a successful one could propel you forward.  Do your Homework!