Relationships with vendors can be fraught with land mines, and nearly everyone in IT knows of one that exploded. Products and services that don't live up to expectations--whether it is fault of the offerings or of the expectations--leave everyone involved disappointed. The complexity of IT products makes the buyer-seller relationship particularly tricky, reports Cara Garretson at Computerworld. 

Avoiding the land mines may not always be possible, but it helps to be diligent before signing any contracts. Always ask a lot of questions and verify the vendor's claims, getting any promises down on paper. This critical step is one that IT vendors sometimes seek to dodge by sidestepping the IT department and selling directly to the business units.   

"Salespeople are very good at convincing business line people," says Mike Paradis, former CIO of Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown. "They sing and dance, and the next thing you know, the business line has a product it can't support."

Business managers and IT should work together in evaluating prospective products, but IT should be in charge of verifying the vendor's claims and making sure the products can be integrated with existing systems, Paradis advises.

Relationships with cloud services vendors can be particularly tricky because it is not always clear what company ultimately is responsible, Garretson reports. An email or storage vendor, for example, might be the customer of a cloud infrastructure provider, who may be responsible, in the end, for a system's performance. StenTel Transcription and Catuogno Court Reporting learned this the hard way when it sought to add storage to the services it provided its customers. The cloud storage provider turned out not to have the expertise to resolve problems because another company provided the core technology.

"The demos looked slick, the vendor made great promises, and we thought we had done our due diligence. After deploying, we found out that the service was a lot less mature than we had thought. We had a lot of issues getting it properly configured. We felt a bit abandoned," says Blake Martin, CIO at StenTel. "It's not that they were unresponsive. It's that they couldn't address the problems themselves and they didn't have enough influence."

For more:
- see Cara Garretson's article at Computerworld

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