In evaluating a company's strength I would suggest you ask the following 15 questions, the answers to which will provide invaluable information in determining the viability of the company, their processes and their commitment to the product you are reviewing. 1.How long have you been in business? Importantly there is no right or wrong answer to these questions, and the answers may vary greatly from one vendor to another. Question 6 - This is generally a good guage of customer satisfaction. If the vendor can not provide this information, or is not willing to do so then you can anticipate a support issue or poor customer satisfaction with the product. Question 10 - You should always have the ability to get to your own data. If you require a programmer to build new reports then you will consistently be biting into your ROI. Question 14 - If the vendor skirts around this issue then they are uncomfortable letting you talk to a recent customer and therefore maybe hiding something from you, perhaps a difficiency in their product or in their implementation process. Question 15 - The answer to this question identifies how 'productised' the software is. A vendor who regularly evaluates their customer's future requirements and spends money on building these into their product is committed to it's current customers. A vendor who spends money only 'as required' is probably not so committed to building a great product as they are to getting sales. When getting answers to these questions please also consider that their may be legitmate commercial reasons as to why a question can not be answered, however at a bear minimum your vendor should be able to provide some background into their reasons for not answering. There are another four important criteria upon which any experienced buyer will evaluate a software purchase which will be covered in future articles.
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