When One Vendor Platform Is Just Right

We struggled with the decision to offer business analytics services for only one vendor's platform, but in the long run, it has helped our organization and our customers.

By DJ Penix

Sometimes when customers ask you to do things that go outside your core capabilities, it is tempting to move in that direction if they pay you enough money. And in exactly that way, our small company was at one time divided: Should we partner exclusively with one channel vendor or offer services for other analytics software vendors as well?

To settle the question, we did a formal evaluation of vendors in our field. We recognized that we have limited resources, so whatever the outcome of our exercise, we had to be able to effectively support the technologies in our core competencies. With that in mind, we established a checklist of important criteria.

We first decided that the platform or platforms we selected had to integrate easily with a wide range of other technologies and databases. Many of our clients have legacy systems in which they have previously invested, and we wanted our solution set to help leverage those investments. Similarly, we considered breadth vs. depth. Could our single vendor or couple of vendors provide the whole solution, making it less complex for our customers?

COMMITMENT AND REPUTATION
Another benchmark we used was commitment to innovation. Because we work with very high-tech software, we wanted vendors to demonstrate that they would make a strong commitment to product research and development to stay ahead of the curve. We also researched how industry experts rated the various vendors. What were publications reporting about the products? What was each vendor's reputation? What companies were clients recommending? The idea was to get independent views.

When we had pulled that information together, we started evaluating the vendors' channel partner programs, which turned out to be more challenging than expected. The partner program from one major vendor was fairly new, and we had concerns about that. Still, it wasn't an excluding factor, and we chose to look at it in a positive way. Would the vendor allow us to help build the program? It was important for us to have a partner we could grow with and know that the feeling was reciprocated. So we asked all the vendors about their plans to break new ground with their programs.

MAKING A LIST, CHECKING IT TWICE 
We next tried to create apples-to-apples comparisons. Initially we felt there were a lot of similarities among the vendors, but there were more differences than we anticipated, such as strengths in some areas, niche focus, mission, and what they wanted to accomplish as a business. So we looked at which vendors were most closely aligned with our beliefs, our mission, and our corporate strengths.

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