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Questions for Vendor References

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by tbeaird 2 views

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I am working on a major WAN/Internet/FW upgrade for my company. As the point of contact, I have been asked to check references. Can anyone give me a website, a reference site, anything I can use as a basis for questioning the references? Also, this project involves MCIWorldcom. Any comments, good or bad, about them?

Thanks,

Tony

2 replies

by al macintyre

You need to locate users provided by the vendor & independently of the vendor.

Are these users happy with the service they getting ... if they had to do a reinstall restart would they go with the same outfit.

How often are there problems in which they have to call tech support & how happy are they with the quality of the support they get.

How often is there a disruption of service & how long does it last & how soon do you find out & do they tell you when it will be fixed.

My employer went with cheapest.

We had a place that never had an outage except when they sent us a fax IN ADVANCE to say they would be down certain time period for upgrades & the time is always like wee hours of weekend.

We now have a place - the first we know of their outage, e-mail is not getting through - they tell us nothing, they no nothing, they have endless supply of excuses that make them sound incompetent.

But hey, the important thing is management is happy because the service is cheaper.

by koko

Tony,

I'm sorry I don't have a specific list of questions, but I can suggest a couple of things. Ask all the vendors involved if they have a list. If so, take the best from each and combine. (Sprint used to have a fantastic boilerplate RFP that I'd modify as needed.)

The other thing I always do is to ask vendor-provided references who else they compared to. You will gain a sense immediately if the reference truly understood the nature of their project, or if they were already pre-sold on a particular supplier, or they chose that supplier because they were obviously comparing them to the wrong competitors.

And I definitely agree--try to get your own independent references in addition to those provided by the vendor.

Finally, you can call a couple of the references and ask them what questions they might ask if they were in your shoes, given that they now have the hindsight of making the decision. Good luck!

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