Tracing the ancestry of a product

To repeat, we ask the same questions of all technology suppliers-this discussion is certainly not limited to OpenText and Autonomy-but sadly too few technology buyers ask those kinds of questions at all. They assume that because a product is part of a "suite" or that it has a generic brand name as part of its title, that the technology is homogenous and homegrown from the supplier. All too often that assumption is just plain wrong.

But why does it matter? Why bother with digging into the history of products? What can one really learn, and is it worth all the effort? Well, to answer the last question first, yes, it is worth the effort, and you run the risk of paying a high price if you do not make the effort. Let me explain why ...

Imagine product X is a collaboration product sold by vendor Y. It looks great, it ran well in a demonstration you watched, and it is competitively priced. You are all set to sign on the dotted line. What could go wrong you ask?

Under the covers

You could find out that, under the covers, it is a very dated and patchy architecture. Although the user interface has been updated and looks cool, the reality is that the product is clunky slow and full of unresolved bugs. It is that way because the product was part of a bundle of products that vendor Y got hold of when it acquired vendor Z in 2009. At the time of the acquisition, vendor Z had neglected that particular product for some time, figuring it couldn't win in the highly competitive collaboration game. Yet since 2009, vendor Y has figured that by giving it a new interface and adding some cheap functionality such as wikis and blogs, it can have another chance at pitching it as an E 2.0 product. Trouble is the founders of vendor Z have long since moved on, as have all the people who built it in the first place. Moreover, in the heady days of its initial development, nobody worried too much about documentation, and frankly nobody really knows the inner workings of the product these days. And support staff assigned to the product by the vendor have only a basic understanding of it, and are of little help when things go wrong.

However, all is not lost, because vendor Y has another collaboration product in its portfolio that is a bit newer and a bit more expensive, so if things really crash on you, they can try and upsell you something else. Does it sound like a nightmare? Sounds like the kind of thing we hear every week at the Real Story Group. Such stories are far from exaggerated or uncommon-they are everyday occurrences.

So what can you do? First, you can access detailed, meticulously researched product evaluations such as the ones we publish. But if that does not appeal to you or is out of your reach, then you should sit down and do the research yourself. Additionally you should always demand to talk to customer references (without the presence of the vendor on the call or visit). And at a bare minimum, ask the vendor itself about the lineage of the product it is trying to sell you. Check out and attend user groups and online forums, in short ... get informed!

Our industry is not so new anymore. Much of the technology in the marketplace, though branded as new and revolutionary, is no such thing. Just as anyone who has looked into their own family history will know there are always both heroes and villains in the mix, it's no different in today's product portfolio craziness.