We have recently completed a tender process for a client which threw up some interesting things. The Client, a big national charity, engaged us last year in a survey project to update their old Case Management System, which resulted in our recommendation to spin up something in one of the world's two biggest modular cloud systems, Zoho and Microsoft. We could of course go into the reasons for this, but that is not the point of this particular post (you can get some of the reasoning here): what was interesting (and what we weren't expecting), was the importance of culture in the process.
Both Zoho and Microsoft offer a wide-ranging set of apps, available over a simple browser that connect to each other to solve business problems. Like any comparison, there are strengths and weaknesses in both sets, but we were expecting that the client would not have to worry about the technology, instead concentrating on the perceived "fit" of the applicants touting the technology to the client organisation. However, it was fascinating how wrong we were: despite the fact that the licence costs of the underlying technologies were pretty similar, the quoted price of the project proposals from Microsoft vendors was roughly 3 (three!) times those of the Zoho partners. Not only that, but the Microsoft proposals emphasised the estimated nature of the price, whereas the Zoho partners were happy to quote a fixed price.
As part of our initial engagement we had built a prototype of what the eventual application would be - we usually do this and it's a great advantage of a cloud-based app universe. As part of the tender process we offered allcomers the chance to log into the prototype, not least to avoid the client having to pay twice for the same initial survey. The Zoho vendors were all over it, but this offer was uniformly ignored by their Microsoft competitors. When the proposals came in, Zoho said "here's how we would take the prototype forward to fix your problem", whereas Microsoft said "here's the rates for our senior (expensive) consultants, here's our typical process, let's list all your obligations, this is the baseline cost". It was only due to an admirable attempt by one of the Microsoft vendors to get down and dirty like Zoho that we had any Microsoft representation on the pitch roster at all. But how did we get to this?
One of the problems of modern technology procurement is the fact that almost all players are tied to one technology. It's as if you were at home, wishing to build a conservatory, picking up a directory and being faced with all sorts of specialists for brickwork, joinery, RSJs etc. Do I need them? How do they fit together? Of course, you have a builder in the real world, somebody who can translate your need to exploit the excellent views over your back garden into the necessary bits. In tech, not so much (unless you are a multinational and can afford the exorbitance of a big four consultancy). Another consequence of this insularity is (evidently) an inability to learn from others. Interestingly, the Microsoft cloud is really their product set from the old "on premise" days, configured for web delivery (you could recognise Sharepoint from 2000, for instance). And, just as the Microsoft products are basically cloud immigrants, so are the people versed in them: most Microsoft vendor employees started in internal IT departments where everything was expressed as time and materials. Zoho, by contrast, is a cloud native, with a vendor community that often started by implementing it as part of a business team. So what? Zoho is streets ahead in productising not only the front end but all the admin functions, allowing non-technical people to run them, whereas Microsoft is a bag of spanners behind the scenes, offering something that only an IT team can make sense of. If I were a Microsoft vendor, I’d look to mitigate that product disadvantage by pre-casting a set of Microsoft tools into something more definable and manageable, suitable for the 95% of business needs (somewhere to store stuff, a means to run processes and reports off the stuff, and a simple interface for people to interact with the stuff on multiple platforms).
But will they bother? Given the lack of independent tech consultants for all but plutocrat firms, maybe it does not matter that, code for code, Microsoft is massively more expensive than Zoho (or any other cloud-first offering), especially as Microsoft is often the only thing most businesses know about, as they contemplate their Outlook inbox. However, you should be aware that there's a ton of good software out there, all available "as is, with a few tweaks" - i.e. a fraction of the cost of the traditional stuff, and with lower risk. It’s not just about licence costs.