We select the provider of IT solutions and keep the mind

    For ten years or more, information technologies have become an integral part of any business. Doing business without the use of software is now in principle impossible. While the business is small, it consists of a founder, an accountant, and a couple of employees, they have enough tables in Excel or verbal instructions. But as the company begins to grow, the need for specialized software increases dramatically. There is another situation when the company is engaged in some specialized projects or a large and extremely important client appears for the well-being of the entire team. And to serve this client, again, you need specialized software whose capabilities go far beyond the MS Office suite.

    At this moment, any business (someone earlier, someone later) is faced with a dilemma: to start your own development department, the size of which can exceed the current size of the company, or look for ready-made solutions on the side. And here begins either the painful search for qualified developers, or the equally painful search for adequate software providers. Our project - ROI4CIO - solves the second problem: it helps consumers find their supplier. In this publication, we will briefly explain why we are needed and what we want to share with the community as part of the purchase of IT solutions.


    Typical negotiations with the supplier. Canvas, oil. (Original: The Expert, 2014 )

    So, let's say that you are an enterprise that is looking for a new ASED solution for your organization. Of course, the chief accountant, along with his gang, is slightly resisting, since they bought 1C and paper orders ten years ago, but the rest of the organization was mired in endless jambs, misunderstandings and those same paper orders that have the unpleasant property of “getting lost” from someone something on the table. It’s definitely impossible to live like this, because 2017 is already ending. And so, you begin to search.

    Obviously, first you will go over free solutions: what do we have there? So so so. Online doesn’t suit you - the amounts in the tariffs of your provider are similar to the full record of the number of PIs, and at the current office at the whole office the page just won’t load, and the whole PC park cannot be called ultramodern. Again, if you make your bukh - aunts powerful in their work, but extremely inert - also go to the Internet, then everything will become completely sad. They have barely mastered the correspondence in messengers, and now they are terrorizing you with stickers. Plus, you will immediately get a demand from your “security guard” to deploy everything on your own server, anyway, it’s now, basically, the administrator’s file-wipe.

    We abandon online solutions (and never know that servicing each user in excess of 10 people will cost $ 8-15 a month) and begin to look for something really serious, big and even “grow”. And here there are just a lot of options. Solutions from 1C, some “Chancellors” and “Directorates”, yes even MS Dynamic CRM or, what the hell, Jira (well, the whole world uses the bug tracker as you like, just for other purposes, what are we worse?) .

    At that moment, it would seem that the story ended, but when you start to figure out what the software manufacturer offers “out of the box”, you understand that this typical solution does not suit you. Well, of course, we could put up with it, but the budget has been allocated, and a solid one, and the goal is to do it once and for the next five to ten years, as was the case with 1C for accounting.

    A conditional buyer of a conditional ERMS or any other system starts looking for a supplier - the one who can “assemble” this box designer into a product that is really necessary for the business. Of course, there are suppliers who simply resell licenses, but the lion's share of them offers favorable rates for one workstation plus, for a certain amount - “dopilivanie” the system to the needs of the company and even subsequent maintenance.

    Here, it seems that you need such a solution, but the supplier requires you to purchase at least 100 licenses, and you need 50. And this supplier offers the 50 licenses you need, but it does not have system support. And this cycle of “comparison of proposals” can occur endlessly. Dozens of price lists and various configurations, tons of correspondence with vendor sellers and other amenities can drag out the purchase and implementation process for months. Of course, it would be possible to hold a tender, but in this case it is not a fact that a supplier will win who will do everything qualitatively - your organization is ready to pay a little more, but there is no goal to save every penny for a quality solution.

    It is for such stalemate situations, when the consumer seems to know what he needs, but cannot choose from a dozen offers placed on the market, and we created our ROI4CIO service.

    In fact, our service helps the buyer to select the necessary configuration of the software solution he needs and, at the output, get an adequate list of suppliers who fully satisfy his requirements on the basis of their price lists and other materials. Schematically, the principle of the service can be displayed as follows:


    At the same time, we believe that the service will be useful not only to the consumer, but also to the sales department of the supplier, who will be able to offload his managers and automate the process of offering services. Those who were involved in sales know that sometimes months-long negotiations and correspondence result in “oh, so you don’t suit us!” And you won’t be able to return the lost time.

    Now our project is in the stage of open testing and we invite readers to poke buttons and give our team feedback. Frankness is only welcome. In subsequent publications, we will talk more about how ROI4CIO was created and works, how the process of purchasing IT solutions and software is organized, and what pitfalls you may encounter.

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