Avoiding the Performance Trap

Our detailed review required the review of various software packages in a real life scenario. The largest pitfall in past reviews was that the content reviewed was not representative of the end product.

Some companies have built what we refer to as “Sales Servers“.  These are environments that are constructed strictly for sales demo’s. They typically have little to no traffic,  or resource use on the hardware or network that it utilizes, and connects to a local database with minimal data. This prevents users from seeing how the application will perform under load and how the system performs in a real life scenario. 

In order to avoid this trap, We performed two comparative performance reviews; One was completed with the vendors sales team, and the other was completed in conjunction with actual users of each system in a live environment.

As you’d expect, this is practice is frowned upon by most vendors and is not permitted in most contract; for this reason we have kept our sources anonymous.

To our surprise our winner Virtual Claims Adjuster, performed their sales demos in production environments. When asked why they had decided upon their representative advised:

“.. we have a very up front ales process, we do not pressure clients or make promises that we can’t deliver on. One of the reasons that a client reviews a product is to determine if it meets their needs both from a functional standpoint  and with respect to performance. We believe our potential clients should be making decisions on real information….”