One of the first things that I have always had trouble with during the analysis of any of the build versus buy scenarios is finding free research that can be used, that is not bias to a specific vendor. It is easier now with the Blogs that are out there on the Internet, but you have to be careful anyway. Just because some guy with a professional looking blog has said that this or that application "kicks xxx" it doesn't mean that they aren't being paid by this vendor to do this, or have some other kind of bias that permeates through the IT industry.
To avoid that, sometimes it is best to actually get research directly from the Vendor, and compare what they say. I know that sounds kind of funny but if you look closely to some of these reports you find out what they think their product competes against. Then, typically I will investigate those products to see if they match what I am looking for.
The concept of it is that by looking at what their competitors are you can get a feel for what areas the product is really good in and what it is not good in. An example is Biztalk which I am very familiar with. In the research for Biztalk 6 (in 2006) Microsoft positioned this product as a tool for Mapping and handling XML. When it came to SOA it was not a big player (although it could have been). In all of the research that I did at the time it put itself in competition with other tools that mapped using XSLT instead of a full fledged SOA. The point is that by looking at their research I knew ahead of time not to expect great scores in SOA Governance, rules engine and other SOA based requirements.
There are a few sites that you can goto for pretty good objective reporting on different products. My favorites are listed below:
Next Time, Purchased Research....
1 comments:
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