Artful Vendor Relations

In any business, nobody does all the work themselves. We all rely on outside vendors from such mundane chores as providing the toilet paper up through providing phone lines, tax services, and legal assistance. And here in Information Technology we have our own set of vendors with wonderfully peculiar characteristics.

We group our unique compatriots into three worlds: the language vendors, the software package vendors, and the hardware vendors. We'll get to all three in due time, but today we will chat about the marvelous world of language vendors.

Selecting a language vendor is a lot like choosing a wife. You may not have as much actual contact with the vendor as you would like, but you will get to deal with what she cooks up, and her aesthetic tastes will affect you long after she is gone. Yeah and changing language vendors is as painful as going through a divorce, but that's a story for another post.

So what should you look for when selecting a language vendor? Probably the most important consideration is to perform an evaluation of their openness and how they admit to bugs and problems. Upgrades to language tools are major undertakings and a vendor doesn't take it lightly. So to meet ongoing challenges they should show resolve to provide workarounds.

Languages and development tools constantly change (and I've never seen a version of a language released with fewer verbs than the previous version). To some extent, the vendor is trying to remain competitive by adding the functionality that becomes available in competitors' products or other languages. A software vendor employs a large number of programmers, who need to keep releasing new versions in order to maintain their livelihoods.

So it turns out to be a bit of a balancing act managing your relationship with a language vendor: stability helps your programmers be productive, and yet staying current of tools allows you to incorporate new aesthetics and retain younger talent. If you happen to be in the position of selecting a vendor at the start of a large project you will partly need to use your intuition (and contacts in the industry) to get a better sense of the credibility of the press and of the vendors.

On the other hand, if one of the major vendors announces their plans for their next release of one of their market-leading programming tools, then you would be remiss to overlook its pending availability in your plans. So take your time and be very deliberate when choosing a language vendor, for you will be living with your choice for a long time.

Artful Purchasing

When you are charged with buying a software package for your company you will brave the pressure of many conflicting forces. Of course the vendors and their employees have a near manic desire to have you select them over their competitors. Be very wary however of vendors who make the first effort to contact you... I mentioned one such salesman horror-story in an earlier post. It's always better to be at the "selecting" end of the vendor relationship than at the solicitation end.

Your staff may have their preferences based upon their own familiarities or tastes. Yet considering the fiduciary responsibility you owe your employer, your overriding role would seem to require you to execute due diligence to evaluate the vendors on a level playing field.

Begin with some exploratory internet searches to find software with keywords representing some of the more specific requirements. This will give you a clue to the names of the main contenders. Then run a query with the top three package names, along with the words "comparison" or "review." This should retrieve some industry zines with a more thorough examination of what the vendors offer.

Now create a spreadsheet for yourself with "weighted" line-items for the characteristics you need. Remember to add lines for Vendor stability and service record: you're not just buying software, you're buying a service relationship with a company. How are they run? Are they stable? How is their customer service? It can easily take a few days to conduct a thorough review.

After you narrow the field ask the top two choices if you can get a demo. Since the actual folks in your company who will be using the package day-to-day may not all have the skill levels to be comfortable with the software, allow them time to examine it and gather their impressions.

Large purchases may require considerably more effort in the review, including issuing formal RFPs, evaluating the impact of any BPR that may need to occur, and determining how you will integrate the new purchase into existing systems. Don't be shy to retain professional assistance for larger selection efforts.

Artful Verification

Sometimes despite your desires to remain logical and analytical (you did after all choose to be a system design professional) you will find yourself in a position that requires you to pass judgment on others. This is never more true than when you are selecting a software package vendor. You have to be friendly but still cynical; vendors send you salespeople who know how to read your desires and make promises that cater to them. As a buyer you need to keep a critical eye toward what you know to be the facts.

Back in the early 1980s, when personal computers had 5 1/4 inch floppy disks and still went zyg zyg beep to start up, when ten megabyte hard disks were all the rage, I had the opportunity to review software vendors to provide hard disk security systems. The concern back then was that somebody could boot up from a floppy, switch to the C drive, and read all your data.

I was impressed by one vendor claiming that they not only could provide complete security, but actually prevent an unauthorized person from accessing the hard disk at all. As I had already reviewed the bios code and was familiar with how a computer loaded its bootstrap, I found their claim to be, eh, interesting. I asked to see a demo and they arranged for a salesman to drop by.

He gave a fairly nice demo, showing how their software could be configured so that only specific people could see certain files. at the end of the demo I commented "gee nice. Hey I was wondering about this item I read here about total protection." I told him that I seriously doubted their software could prevent somebody from destroying all the data on the C drive. He adamantly assured me that it would. Well then, was he confident enough that he would let me have a crack at his demo computer? Without a flinch he said sure!

I carried up a boot disk with the old DOS debug program on it, turned off his computer, put the disk in, and turned the computer on again. Zyg zyg beep! At the DOS prompt I typed debug and then used a command to write all zeroes to the boot sector on the hard disk. "Well uh, I think I just wiped your C drive," I shrugged. The salesperson didn't believe me. I removed my floppy disk and watched in a pitying amusement as he tried to restart his computer. Naturally the C drive was no longer readable at all (now he would have to reformat it). Needless to say we didn't purchase their software. Moral of the story: when you are buying software, trust... but verify.