6 ms·

Back when I had my own HPC company, we often consulted on RFP specs for customers building clusters. After a while we started building our own clusters. A wel

by hpcjoe 5y ago

Back when I had my own HPC company, we often consulted on RFP specs for customers building clusters. After a while we started building our own clusters. A well known large/prestigious university on the East Coast US called us to help with the RFP, and bid. We did. We found out later that they simply wanted help with the RFP. They never took our bid seriously. Small company with a great rep, they preferred dealing with the large companies with meh reps. Another one ... a university somewhere here in Michigan, an alma mater of mine in fact, did something akin to this, but used another vendor as its stalking horse. We constructed our bid aggressively, and submitted. Later that month, while on vacation with the family in Florida, the purchasing agent called me up. She wanted me to teach the other companies how to do what we did (much higher density, far better performance, etc.) I asked why. She said they liked our solution. They just didn't want to buy from us. We'd won the RFP. But lost the business. Of course, we declined teaching our competitors. They (the university) were unhappy with that, and didn't understand why we wouldn't do this for them. I was then, and still am somewhat, blown away by the complete lack of understanding of how businesses actually work, on the part of the RFP folks, the purchasing agents, etc. Another time, I had a university call us up asking for a bid for something. I asked if they had a preferred vendor (all do). She said yes, but state law said they need at least 3 bids before they can purchase. I asked if our bid would be taken seriously. She said no. Yeah. I've shared some of these anecdotes with others in this industry, and we all nod our heads. All of us have run into this before. Some of the stories are far more outrageous than mine. An interesting tangent: I currently work for a company whose RFP we won ~14 years ago for storage, but was rejected by the person who was my first boss here, as we (the company back then) were too small. That's happened multiple times throughout my career. Even though our solution was demonstrably superior in all technical and financial aspects, we "lost". Can be disheartening.

mcv 5y ago
> I asked if they had a preferred vendor (all do). She said yes, but state law said they need at least 3 bids before they can purchase. I asked if our bid would be taken seriously. She said no. That is just a pointless law, if it requires 3 bids, but you can ignore them. Mind you, fixing that isn't trivial either; the EU has very strict rules on government procurement, where the government organisation has to write down very detailed rules on how the procurement will work and will be evaluated, and then they have to follow those rules. Of course that has lead to companies gaming the bidding system: they design their bid to win, but it exploits all the holes in the rules; either it will be lacking in quality in an area the customer failed to specify, or it will go way over budget and the customer will be responsible for those costs, etc. My wife has been involved in bids like these where one bid was clearly the best one, but another was technically the winner according to the rules. So they redid the bid and rewrote the rules to better fit what they wanted, but I think that had to go to court. It's a hornet's nest, no matter how you turn it. In a distant past, I worked for a small web development company with a pretty good open source CMS, and we were hired to do a few government websites. The actual bidder wasn't us; it was one of those big companies that specialised in winning those bids. We just did all of the actual work. We probably didn't get all of the actual money. It's a weird market.
- GabeIsko 5y ago
  > That is just a pointless law, if it requires 3 bids, but you can ignore them. Whenever taxpayer money changes hands it is very political. You elude to that a little bit in another paragraph, but governments can't just go out and buy things - their decisions will be held responsible politically so everything has do be done by the book. If someone goes off the rails, it potentially represents favoritism and people will protest. I see a lot of this happen in some of the more local politics I am involved in rather than the more routine world of software procurement, but people in my hometown are getting into quite an uproar over the local government trying to give tax incentives to develop an empty lot that costs millions in municipal taxes for yearly upkeep and appraisal. This presents an inherent conflict of interest, because the RFP process is insane. Therefore there is always a compromise that needs to be made for government workers to investigate and decide on project requirements in a fluid manner, and the need to document those requirements, set them in stone, and allow bidders to respond to them in an impartial way. The compromise is that there is usually an RFI stage where the procurement officers are "gathering information" but that is where they are really deciding what they are going to buy before they formalize the RFP. I think this is fundamentally broken - we need to recognize that procurement involves some deferment to experts who know what they are doing, and we need to trust them to make good decisions about how to do their jobs and get the software they need. But there is still a huge skills gap in a lot of governments over technology expertise, so the more a beaurocracy leans on responses to prescribe solutions, the slower this will be solved. > We just did all of the actual work. We probably didn't get all of the actual money. Idk about your personal situation, but a lot of these times when you look at the RFP, there is a usually a clause to provide documentation, and training, and helpdesk support in perpetuity. Consulting and contract work is a field unto itself, and the big players are big precisely because they can organize large multiyear projects that will fulfill these requirements that cannot fail. I help run a partnership program at a software vendor, and we tell the smaller companies the same thing - don't market yourself to the government, market yourself to the consulting companies because that is who will be paying you at the end of the day.
bombcar 5y ago
The most understandable of all those is the "too small" - once you've been in the business long enough you realize that small companies can disappear quite quickly. Large ones can too, but it's much less common (and if they do go down, you can point to everyone else taken down with them). The workaround is to sell your stuff through a larger company that's complementary.
- toyg 5y ago
  On the other hand, if you are a midsize or large business, with minimal effort you can effectively own a vendor that will act as an unofficial extra department. You give them enough business to become their biggest customer and they are effectively hooked for life, because who's ever going to drop a client providing 40-50% of their total revenue?
throwawayboise 5y ago
> University Universities are almost a separate reality. Unless you happen to be dealing with someone who has prior experience in the private sector, they will have no idea how businesses operate or how money is earned. It's typical to be dealing with someone who has been doing the same job for 20 years and never worked anywhere else.
- rprospero 5y ago
  It’s not necessarily that they don’t understand, but rather that they have very different incentives. I remember talking to one university purchasing agent whose senior manager kept a detailed account of how many of their vendors went bankrupt. If this percentage got too LOW, they were instructed to just stop paying out any purchase orders where the goods had been received. Any vendors upset at providing their services for free could take it up with the legal department. Or go bankrupt. Either way, every dollar unpaid to a vendor was a dollar back in a tax payer’s pocket. Ignoring these bills was a civic duty. A different university had a policy to prefer orders from small businesses for just the same reason. The local suppliers knew that, on any given job, there was about a 10% chance the university would never pay up. They could sue, but a) the legal department had handle thousands of these cases and had gotten pretty good at it, and b) they would be banned from any future bids. One percent of the time, some one would get stiffed twice in a row and go under, but, hey, if you aren’t okay with risk, then maybe the public sector isn’t the place for you. Anyway, that’s the prevailing attitude that I encountered. They are ACUTELY aware of how money is earned and will do everything in their power to stop you from earning it.
  - dchftcs 5y ago
    Universities are truly rotten places.
  - Hallucinaut 5y ago
    At least in the UK I don't think that attitude would fly given the requirements for timely supply chain payments. They actively encourage SME use in some fields and the ecosystem is richer for it. An attitude like you describe would be seriously damaging. How on earth does a legal department win cases where they simply do not pay for what they are contractually obligated to pay for? Sounds like a dystopian system.
ineedasername 5y ago
>too small I'm sorry to tell you, but I am one of those people who frequently argue against a small less established vendor, at least for anything really important. Why? I've been burned a few times. New (< 5 years) small companies can disappear overnight. If they don't simply disappear and have a bit of revenue then they often get acquired by one of the big players. Those players either: 1) don't know how to properly manage this new product and it stagnates, the 75% of account managers are fired and support goes to shit. Or: 2) the company has no intention of keeping the product, and despite initial assurances to the contrary a year goes by and I get a notice that they're shifting all customers of the acquired product to their own competing version. Sometimes this comes with a very sneaky hard sell to re-up on a long term contract before the announce the product EOL.
- CPLX 5y ago
  3) You do in fact get to keep the product you wanted but now a sociopathic sales team tries to get you to pay 3x as much for a long term contract to lock you into it.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Ah, yes. I noped out of that once, though I had to stick it out for a year or so before I could call it quits.
  - protomyth 5y ago
    Or they use a "licensing audit" as a negotiating tool for that long term contract.
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      Ah, the Oracle method. I'm betting a lot of PeopleSoft customers found themselves on the sharp end of that stick when Oracle bought them out.
- syshum 5y ago
  Ironically I have been burned often by big companies... ohh sure they do not go out of business, but they do other things like killing off products, versions, features, etc... that will burn you
ocdtrekkie 5y ago
Some notes on the other side: - I try really really hard not to have a preferred vendor. Hilariously, a lot of companies ask me who my preferred vendor is... which makes it rough to do this. I list off a couple companies I've bought from and inevitably they go through one of those. - The fact that manufacturers give preferred pricing to the first reseller to register the deal with them renders almost all competitive bidding kind of moot at this point for a lot of things. Basically means whoever I reach out to in order to get the ballpark numbers for budget purposes will win. - Almost every time a third party comes in cheaper, they did something wrong. Literally once had a smaller party come in drastically cheaper than... the manufacturer of the products in question. Obviously, they misread what they were bidding on, it cost them time and money, us time and money, etc.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  I often get corporates who won't buy direct, they will put out a request for a quote and I'll get four or five resellers asking for a price on a very specific configuration. I never give any of them a discount, in fact I'd love to be able to charge them more because they always require more administrative work. Sometimes I'll offer the end customer a discount to try and route around them. Recently one reseller became particularly agitated about this. After several emails he asked to speak to my manager (I own the business). The amusing thing was that he had lost the bid. I already had an order from one of his competitors. I should add that I do have some resellers who actively promote my products, they are worth the effort and a discount.

by hpcjoe 5y ago

mcv 5y ago

> I asked if they had a preferred vendor (all do). She said yes, but state law said they need at least 3 bids before they can purchase. I asked if our bid would be taken seriously. She said no. That is just a pointless law, if it requires 3 bids, but you can ignore them. Mind you, fixing that isn't trivial either; the EU has very strict rules on government procurement, where the government organisation has to write down very detailed rules on how the procurement will work and will be evaluated, and then they have to follow those rules. Of course that has lead to companies gaming the bidding system: they design their bid to win, but it exploits all the holes in the rules; either it will be lacking in quality in an area the customer failed to specify, or it will go way over budget and the customer will be responsible for those costs, etc. My wife has been involved in bids like these where one bid was clearly the best one, but another was technically the winner according to the rules. So they redid the bid and rewrote the rules to better fit what they wanted, but I think that had to go to court. It's a hornet's nest, no matter how you turn it. In a distant past, I worked for a small web development company with a pretty good open source CMS, and we were hired to do a few government websites. The actual bidder wasn't us; it was one of those big companies that specialised in winning those bids. We just did all of the actual work. We probably didn't get all of the actual money. It's a weird market.

GabeIsko 5y ago
> That is just a pointless law, if it requires 3 bids, but you can ignore them. Whenever taxpayer money changes hands it is very political. You elude to that a little bit in another paragraph, but governments can't just go out and buy things - their decisions will be held responsible politically so everything has do be done by the book. If someone goes off the rails, it potentially represents favoritism and people will protest. I see a lot of this happen in some of the more local politics I am involved in rather than the more routine world of software procurement, but people in my hometown are getting into quite an uproar over the local government trying to give tax incentives to develop an empty lot that costs millions in municipal taxes for yearly upkeep and appraisal. This presents an inherent conflict of interest, because the RFP process is insane. Therefore there is always a compromise that needs to be made for government workers to investigate and decide on project requirements in a fluid manner, and the need to document those requirements, set them in stone, and allow bidders to respond to them in an impartial way. The compromise is that there is usually an RFI stage where the procurement officers are "gathering information" but that is where they are really deciding what they are going to buy before they formalize the RFP. I think this is fundamentally broken - we need to recognize that procurement involves some deferment to experts who know what they are doing, and we need to trust them to make good decisions about how to do their jobs and get the software they need. But there is still a huge skills gap in a lot of governments over technology expertise, so the more a beaurocracy leans on responses to prescribe solutions, the slower this will be solved. > We just did all of the actual work. We probably didn't get all of the actual money. Idk about your personal situation, but a lot of these times when you look at the RFP, there is a usually a clause to provide documentation, and training, and helpdesk support in perpetuity. Consulting and contract work is a field unto itself, and the big players are big precisely because they can organize large multiyear projects that will fulfill these requirements that cannot fail. I help run a partnership program at a software vendor, and we tell the smaller companies the same thing - don't market yourself to the government, market yourself to the consulting companies because that is who will be paying you at the end of the day.

bombcar 5y ago

The most understandable of all those is the "too small" - once you've been in the business long enough you realize that small companies can disappear quite quickly. Large ones can too, but it's much less common (and if they do go down, you can point to everyone else taken down with them). The workaround is to sell your stuff through a larger company that's complementary.

toyg 5y ago
On the other hand, if you are a midsize or large business, with minimal effort you can effectively own a vendor that will act as an unofficial extra department. You give them enough business to become their biggest customer and they are effectively hooked for life, because who's ever going to drop a client providing 40-50% of their total revenue?

throwawayboise 5y ago

> University Universities are almost a separate reality. Unless you happen to be dealing with someone who has prior experience in the private sector, they will have no idea how businesses operate or how money is earned. It's typical to be dealing with someone who has been doing the same job for 20 years and never worked anywhere else.

rprospero 5y ago
It’s not necessarily that they don’t understand, but rather that they have very different incentives. I remember talking to one university purchasing agent whose senior manager kept a detailed account of how many of their vendors went bankrupt. If this percentage got too LOW, they were instructed to just stop paying out any purchase orders where the goods had been received. Any vendors upset at providing their services for free could take it up with the legal department. Or go bankrupt. Either way, every dollar unpaid to a vendor was a dollar back in a tax payer’s pocket. Ignoring these bills was a civic duty. A different university had a policy to prefer orders from small businesses for just the same reason. The local suppliers knew that, on any given job, there was about a 10% chance the university would never pay up. They could sue, but a) the legal department had handle thousands of these cases and had gotten pretty good at it, and b) they would be banned from any future bids. One percent of the time, some one would get stiffed twice in a row and go under, but, hey, if you aren’t okay with risk, then maybe the public sector isn’t the place for you. Anyway, that’s the prevailing attitude that I encountered. They are ACUTELY aware of how money is earned and will do everything in their power to stop you from earning it.
- dchftcs 5y ago
  Universities are truly rotten places.
- Hallucinaut 5y ago
  At least in the UK I don't think that attitude would fly given the requirements for timely supply chain payments. They actively encourage SME use in some fields and the ecosystem is richer for it. An attitude like you describe would be seriously damaging. How on earth does a legal department win cases where they simply do not pay for what they are contractually obligated to pay for? Sounds like a dystopian system.

ineedasername 5y ago

>too small I'm sorry to tell you, but I am one of those people who frequently argue against a small less established vendor, at least for anything really important. Why? I've been burned a few times. New (< 5 years) small companies can disappear overnight. If they don't simply disappear and have a bit of revenue then they often get acquired by one of the big players. Those players either: 1) don't know how to properly manage this new product and it stagnates, the 75% of account managers are fired and support goes to shit. Or: 2) the company has no intention of keeping the product, and despite initial assurances to the contrary a year goes by and I get a notice that they're shifting all customers of the acquired product to their own competing version. Sometimes this comes with a very sneaky hard sell to re-up on a long term contract before the announce the product EOL.

CPLX 5y ago
3) You do in fact get to keep the product you wanted but now a sociopathic sales team tries to get you to pay 3x as much for a long term contract to lock you into it.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Ah, yes. I noped out of that once, though I had to stick it out for a year or so before I could call it quits.
- protomyth 5y ago
  Or they use a "licensing audit" as a negotiating tool for that long term contract.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Ah, the Oracle method. I'm betting a lot of PeopleSoft customers found themselves on the sharp end of that stick when Oracle bought them out.
syshum 5y ago
Ironically I have been burned often by big companies... ohh sure they do not go out of business, but they do other things like killing off products, versions, features, etc... that will burn you

ocdtrekkie 5y ago

Some notes on the other side: - I try really really hard not to have a preferred vendor. Hilariously, a lot of companies ask me who my preferred vendor is... which makes it rough to do this. I list off a couple companies I've bought from and inevitably they go through one of those. - The fact that manufacturers give preferred pricing to the first reseller to register the deal with them renders almost all competitive bidding kind of moot at this point for a lot of things. Basically means whoever I reach out to in order to get the ballpark numbers for budget purposes will win. - Almost every time a third party comes in cheaper, they did something wrong. Literally once had a smaller party come in drastically cheaper than... the manufacturer of the products in question. Obviously, they misread what they were bidding on, it cost them time and money, us time and money, etc.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
I often get corporates who won't buy direct, they will put out a request for a quote and I'll get four or five resellers asking for a price on a very specific configuration. I never give any of them a discount, in fact I'd love to be able to charge them more because they always require more administrative work. Sometimes I'll offer the end customer a discount to try and route around them. Recently one reseller became particularly agitated about this. After several emails he asked to speak to my manager (I own the business). The amusing thing was that he had lost the bid. I already had an order from one of his competitors. I should add that I do have some resellers who actively promote my products, they are worth the effort and a discount.