Results2Match

Within the Results2Match community we have a vast experience of comparing software products, interestingly enough both from the customer and vendor perspective. Over the years, many tailor made comparison lists, graphs, and whatever have been produced for this. Triggered by the rather humorous Software Vendors and the Tragic Quadrant article by Bruce Richardson from AMR Research, I polished up my comparison tool for you to use in your own business.

The problem in comparing IT solutions is that you have to look much wider than the simple feature-function side of it. Selecting any IT-solution has a big impact for at least 5 to 10 years in an organization. The cost of buying the solution will only be a (small) part of the total cost of its life cycle. From implementation, training, updates, maintenance up to phase out, and replacement, the total involved costs will be a multiple of just the amount paid for license or usage. Of course, it is completely impossible to predict fully everything that will happen during the use of a solution for the next 10 years: vendors disappear or are taken over, new solution types become available, your company‘s needs are changing, the market demand is changing, etc. But giving your best 360° look will at least will improve the quality of your business decision.

Some lessons I learned in comparing solutions:

• Any individual factor can be weighted but the absolute outcome will not tell the whole story: the best functionally rated system will when not accepted by the users for usability reasons still can prove to be the wrong choice.
• Vendors promise the world: time invested on finding out how the market, users, and even competition think about a vendor is time well spend.
• But only believe your own eyes and ears: analyst quadrants, super positive reference visits and flashy customer centers are all paid for.
• More selection criteria, more involved teams, more outside consultancy will not help you: in the end you have to allow yourself to choose based on facts and feeling.
• The obvious choice is not so obvious: a well-established solution from a market leader might be a safe choice but the flexibility and eagerness of a start up to get their first reference may be just what you need for your situation.

I developed a full circle set of questions to compare solutions at a managerial level. The questions are grouped around the main aspects in solution comparison. All answers are ranked from 1 to 5, if unknown a 0 is given. Do not be surprised if you selection project team initially cannot answer many of the questions: they often were never programmed to think full circle. The answers are plain observations: no ranking for your specific situation. The outcome will give you a spider‘s web image for every solution. When the webs are compared, you will immediately see how solutions differ in their coverage of technical, commercial, organizational, and cost of ownership aspects. Now it is time for you to ask the question what type of spider web is best for your organization.

Not scientific enough? Just try it and you will be surprised what it will do for you. Even if the outcome is just discovering that an evaluation was not looking for the answers you need to decide or that the compared products are completely interchangeable, is a nice value of an exercise which will take you 15 minutes.

We created the Software Comparison Web in Excel and the questions and the resulting web are available. We use the Creative Commons Naamsvermelding 3.0 Nederland licentie. Download here the Software Comparison Web (free for you to use if you mention Results2Match as the source and without any warranty or liability by Results2Match).

Your feedback on usability or any other comment is highly appreciated.

hans.van.nes@results2match.com