I hate to say you have lost! - Part II

Thanks a lot Phil for your comments. You make valid points about #2 and #3 of my blog post “I hate to say you have lost”.

In case of #2, your observations are valid. Especially, if the technology is new, indeed it makes a lot of sense on the part of the vendor to educate prospects and I am sure this could even lead to drastic change in requirements on the part of prospect.

In case of #3, I agree that organizations need to build capabilities in evaluating systems and technologies. In fact we too have a team engaged in this activity. However, my point is that unlike IT research and consulting firms such as Gartner, user organizations need not in absolute sense judge a system or an offering. The frame of reference for evaluations is always parameters and conditions prevalent in the user organization. After a couple of system evaluation exercises that we carried out, many vendors kept on challenging our decision and kept on telling us that their solution was the best. I know of atleast 2 examples, when organizations opted for Baan when SAP could have been a better choice for them. And the choice of Baan by these organizations did not in anyway mean that Baan was better than SAP.