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I am engineer, now trying to sell enterprise software. May be I can shed some light. If a company says it is not their current focus even after paying 200k, yo

I am engineer, now trying to sell enterprise software. May be I can shed some light. If a company says it is not their current focus even after paying 200k, you should looking into finding an alternative vendor who is willing to go above and beyond. A good vendor gets you by features and keeps you with exceptional service. I have seen vendors saying that those words when they are in extraction mode. In my opinion orgs should have service contract. It is more important when you are responding to RFP and you are a b2b org. If you dont have a service contract for tools and service you use, you will run into liabilities that you don't own and can delegate it to the vendor.

jiggawatts 3y ago
> saying that those words when they are in extraction mode. These words were almost verbatim used this morning in a meeting. A small agile ISV was purchased by one of those big "holding companies" and now everything is "for consideration", "not on the roadmap", "not strictly required", or like you said "not their current focus". We've been raising issues like: "You're using frameworks and SDKs that went end-of-life years ago for Internet-facing security-critical components, how is that not your current focus!?" and hearing crickets in response. Support contract is in place, but there's no specific clause requiring them to do their job, so they're not doing it.
- debarshri 3y ago
  I think you are not the target customer that the holding companies is looking for. I would try to see an out and look for another vendor, tool or alternative.
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    Too much lock-in due to extensive customisations — which is precisely why the small ISV was a lucrative purchase for the holding company. They can safely milk their customers for enough years to recoup the investment.
  - lmm 3y ago
    > I think you are not the target customer that the holding companies is looking for. On the contrary, customers who keep paying them while they do the bare minimum to keep the thing limping along is probably exactly what the holding company is looking for.
andrewstuart2 3y ago
I respect your position but it doesn't sound like you've worked for any company that's decided to "buy in to the ecosystem" for any sufficiently large ecosystem. Get all your data in DataDog and try to leave. Build your business on IBM and see how agile you are in 25 years. Same goes for pretty much any large enterprise software, even the free ones. Good luck leaving git. Good luck de-kubernetesifying someday to a higher or lower level of abstraction. And good luck getting the procurement department to approve your exception to not use the #blessed vendor for just your org. What happens is, everyone does that and then spends 20x more money on 5x vendors and then the other 15x is trying to integrate them all so you have a coherent business. My experience has been, service contracts are a great way to feel a false sense of security and burn cash until you need service, and then they're a great way to sit on a phone call watching revenue burn while you say "they haven't gotten back to us yet" until they say "yeah it looks fine on our end, sorry."
- debarshri 3y ago
  You are absolutely try. No I haven't worked for company like this. Also, I don't even know how these massive companies sell their product in a hyper competitive enterprise market.
- tyingq 3y ago
  Your purchasing folks and CXX people are doing it for other reasons, like a convenient scapegoat, liability shift, etc, if things go wrong. "We experienced a day-long outage due to a problem with a third party vendor". Or plain old job security...it's hard for them to accept a process where something gets selected without their input.

jiggawatts 3y ago

> saying that those words when they are in extraction mode. These words were almost verbatim used this morning in a meeting. A small agile ISV was purchased by one of those big "holding companies" and now everything is "for consideration", "not on the roadmap", "not strictly required", or like you said "not their current focus". We've been raising issues like: "You're using frameworks and SDKs that went end-of-life years ago for Internet-facing security-critical components, how is that not your current focus!?" and hearing crickets in response. Support contract is in place, but there's no specific clause requiring them to do their job, so they're not doing it.

debarshri 3y ago
I think you are not the target customer that the holding companies is looking for. I would try to see an out and look for another vendor, tool or alternative.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  Too much lock-in due to extensive customisations — which is precisely why the small ISV was a lucrative purchase for the holding company. They can safely milk their customers for enough years to recoup the investment.
- lmm 3y ago
  > I think you are not the target customer that the holding companies is looking for. On the contrary, customers who keep paying them while they do the bare minimum to keep the thing limping along is probably exactly what the holding company is looking for.

andrewstuart2 3y ago

I respect your position but it doesn't sound like you've worked for any company that's decided to "buy in to the ecosystem" for any sufficiently large ecosystem. Get all your data in DataDog and try to leave. Build your business on IBM and see how agile you are in 25 years. Same goes for pretty much any large enterprise software, even the free ones. Good luck leaving git. Good luck de-kubernetesifying someday to a higher or lower level of abstraction. And good luck getting the procurement department to approve your exception to not use the #blessed vendor for just your org. What happens is, everyone does that and then spends 20x more money on 5x vendors and then the other 15x is trying to integrate them all so you have a coherent business. My experience has been, service contracts are a great way to feel a false sense of security and burn cash until you need service, and then they're a great way to sit on a phone call watching revenue burn while you say "they haven't gotten back to us yet" until they say "yeah it looks fine on our end, sorry."

debarshri 3y ago
You are absolutely try. No I haven't worked for company like this. Also, I don't even know how these massive companies sell their product in a hyper competitive enterprise market.
tyingq 3y ago
Your purchasing folks and CXX people are doing it for other reasons, like a convenient scapegoat, liability shift, etc, if things go wrong. "We experienced a day-long outage due to a problem with a third party vendor". Or plain old job security...it's hard for them to accept a process where something gets selected without their input.