Rob Enderle Principal Analyst for the Enderle Group
By Rob Enderle, Principal Analyst, Enderle Group
With any new concept there is often a rush to deployment followed by a massive amount of regret because too many firms, service providers, and hardware vendors are learning on the job. In picking a partner to help you make your decision you should concentrate on a number of factors: real experience, self-confidence in their own capability, knowledge about your company and industry, tested responsiveness to issues, and guarantees that you will get an experienced team.
Let’s take each in turn.
Real Experience
When a technology or concept like cloud computing becomes trendy, folks come out of the woodwork claiming to be experts–but few initially really are. This is where you need to look at the firm’s pedigree and reference accounts and not take either at face value. Much like you should do a background check on a new employee, a partner company should be vetted to make sure they actually know what they are doing in the new area and that they have a track record of doing it successfully.
Often it is better to actually start with peer companies and find partners these companies recommend rather than the more typical way of selecting a partner based on their initial pitch or low bid. In something as potentially comprehensive as cloud computing learning on the job costs can overwhelm any price savings.
Self-Confidence
You want a firm that has deployed these solutions themselves. The first quest I feel should be asked of any vendor pitching any new solution is whether they have deployed it themselves widely yet. It is not uncommon for internal IT managers in large providers who have intimate knowledge of the solution to avoid it like the plague for years after the firm has started selling it. A company that won’t “eat its own dog food” in this category of product should be avoided in favor of those that are actively embracing their own solutions.
In addition, by experiencing the related pain firsthand the firm is more likely to correct product shortcomings aggressively because they will place such corrections at a higher priority typically then if they aren’t themselves suffering from the problem. Finally, and this goes to trust, a company that isn’t forthright with their own concerns surrounding an offering is demonstrating untrustworthy behavior which is very dangerous in any vendor.
Company/Industry Knowledge
When choosing between vendors, one that knows your industry should out rank one who does not, and one that knows your own company should have an advantage. This is because they are more likely to see, in advance, approaches that will both work better and won’t work at all assuring a better optimized result more quickly. In addition, the more knowledgeable they are the more likely they will already have needed relationships to help make the deployment go more easily. They can also help avoid many of the roadblocks that typically plague large new technology deployments.
Particularly with a cloud solution, a tight relationship between the vendor and the company needs to be maintained indefinitely and all relationships between companies and people don’t work. Picking a company that has already demonstrated they are compatible can help avoid having to switch vendors mid-deployment.
Tested Responsiveness
One of the few times I’ve seen a massive layoff in an IT organization was as a result of using a vendor who had an unknown, and as it turned out, inadequate ability to respond to problems with a brand new technology. Major technology changes like those represented by the cloud come with lots of breakage, but if critical systems are left down for long periods of time not only is the company put at risk but IT jobs going up to the CIO are put at risk as well.
You want a company that has a track record of being as responsive as the deployment will require. If this is a mission-critical system being replaced then they need to have a demonstrated ability to respond to high priority problems in minutes if not seconds and a firm that will get to you by the end of the week going to be both revenue and career limiting.
Experienced Team
After all of this and even with the best of companies there will be young inexperienced teams fielded to roll out offerings the firm sells because this is a new area. You don’t want one of these. Before you sign up, you want assurances that the team your are getting will be as experienced as you expected them to be and that you are in the approval path for any staffing changes that might affect you. This also means you need to keep track of and ask for people who have done great jobs for you in the past and quickly get rid of–and not allow back–any folks who have become problems.
One of the biggest disasters I’ve ever been part resulted from an inexperienced team being assigned to a critical project by an otherwise experienced company and the words “train wreck” are simply inadequate to describe what resulted.
Wrapping Up:
We are in the early adopter wave of cloud computing and that means that you are on the forefront of a major change. There are clear economic advantages to being early but being an early adopter doesn’t come without risk. If you adequately assure both the company and team that will be working on your project you will also go a long way towards assuring the result. It is easy to get overwhelmed by salespeople and promises but it is your due diligence that will make sure you don’t regret your decisions. Particularly for early adopters it is that due diligence that makes the difference between success and failure.
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