Don't trust all the advice you get

Every once in a while, I like to give you a horror story.  They come from real life of course, with the names and some of the details changed.  I give you two cases, both where customers bought networks and servers from me, but bought their business software from other parties.

Now don't get me wrong, I couldn't have sold them that business software.  I was a hardware and integration guy, not a software vendor.  I welcomed the deals.  However, they are useful parables for dealing with software vendors.

In today's installment, I'll recount the story of a retail company that needed a new accounting system.  They came to us as the result of a referral and asked us to sell them a server, some workstations and other stuff.  The first thing I asked was what the vendor recommended.  Ideally, I hoped he had some literature with the requirements spelled out in detail.  He kind of shrugged and gave me the name and number of the rep that he was working with.

I called this person, and after a couple of tries, finally got to talk interactively.  When I asked what he recommended, he initially didn't have a preference, but when I pushed, he said that, while they ran on both NetWare and NT, the company was going more towards NT and that would be what he'd recommend.  I asked about the amount of memory, hard disk space, etc. and he couldn't answer, referring me to a technician.  After a couple of more tries with the technician, I finally got some specifications, but the company had nothing formally in writing.  In a nutshell, they were of almost no help.

I went back to the customer and advised him of the conversations.  Being an old Novell fan, I suggested he go with NetWare, but he had heard that NT was better, and the rep said the company was headed that way, so he decided to go with Microsoft instead.

After the customer got the software installed, he almost immediately started having trouble.  After spending a lot of money on our engineers to fix the wide number of problems he had, it finally came out, from the vendor's tech support group, that he really should have bought NetWare.  The version he purchased was really more well suited for Novell's platform than Microsoft's.  This is, of course, not what the rep had recommended.

Eventually, the customer's problems settled down, but he never has had what I would call a really stable system.  It's too bad, because he's running his entire operations on this software, and when it goes down, his people sit around until our engineers can get it back up and running.  NOT the best use of his money.

He has been a good sport, even joking with me about how I had "told him so."  But, it is worth noting that I was off the hook.  The vendor and the customer were inclined towards the wrong platform and didn't take MY advice.  In the case of the vendor, the rep didn't have a clue - he was just talking about the futures he had heard about in the company cafeteria.  And when I talked to a tech, thinking he'd have a more useful answer, he wasn't much more help.

In the case of the customer, he was basing an important decision, not on the technical situation, but on someone telling him what they had heard about.  This someone wasn't an experienced networking person...it was just some PC hobbyist that was a friend of his.

The morals of this story are:

Demand written specifications from your software vendor of their requirements for the version of software you're buying...not for where they'll be in 5 years.  Make sure that the word comes from qualified technical staff.  And the specs shouldn't be something the rep just researched and typed up for you.  They should be a formal part of the product's technical literature.  Warning bells should clang if this isn't so.

As for taking advice from friends...if they've really used the product in an environment similar to yours, then heed their advice.  But if their opinions come from what they've read, without any real experience, look elsewhere for wisdom.

Tomorrow...paying top dollar for beta software.

 

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