Can your vendor be too successful? < Real Story Group Blog.

You may be getting pressure to join a particular tool’s bandwagon. This year it could be Drupal, Sitecore, Jive, or Liferay. Next year it will certainly be a different set of names. Our industry is nothing if not faddish. When faced with the bandwagon effect, I encourage you to pause and consider all the angles.

You see, one of the more consistent findings of ourtechnology evaluation research over the past decade is a bit of a paradox: the “hottest” (i.e., most popular at that time) vendors and open source projects are also the ones where customers experience some of the greatest heartburn.

There are many reasons for this:

• Senior management at the vendor gets distracted, by media and speaking requests, analyst relations, raising money while they’re still a hot commodity, or appeasing their incumbent VC overlords
• Rapid expansion of their professional services arm and customer support staff leads them to hire people who don’t know what their talking about, let alone know much about that platform
• Their partner consulting channel gets similarly strained, overcommitted, and on aggregate, underexperienced
• Your own internal staff who learn the platform’s innards get recruited away by headhunters

Continues @http://www.realstorygroup.com/Blog/2064-Can-your-vendor-be-too-successful