Which service or product is perfect for my requirements?

Did you ever run into a situation where you have multiple choices of the product and/or services to choose from, and you don’t know which one is a best choice for you and your organization?

In the modern era, where companies are developing rapid solutions, often we are presented with multiple products and/or services to solve our business problems. Even, it may sometimes be possible that the same company is offering you multiple products/services with the overlapping features. And it can be overwhelming to make a choice.

Now, let’s try to understand it from a practical example. Assume, you are a customer running SAP systems. You will need a lot of enveloping services to complete your business process flow. A few of those essential requirements are backup, monitoring, integration, analytics, etc. No matter if you run SAP on-premises or in Azure, you will need these services. Now you start exploring which service(s) is better for me, and you realized there are multiple services offered in Azure, SAP, or third party which fulfil your requirements. So, which one do I select?

In this article, you will find ten selection criteria which may help you to make the right decision. If you are puzzled on which services to choose from, use the table provided at the end of the article, and the service scores most, is your optimal choice.

Please note, the intent of this article is to help customer make a right choice, and NOT TO COMPARE SERVICES FROM DIFFERENT PROVIDERS, AND/OR PROVE OR COMPARE WHICH SERVICE OR PROVIDER IS BEST.

1.     Business and technical requirements

Have your business and technical requirements documented. Check the requirements against services/products and evaluate which one fulfills all or most of your requirements.  It is also very important that you get clarity on your future requirements as well (as much as possible) and check the feature of service/product against your requirements, so you don’t have to change the product/service in near future. For example: If you are looking for a messaging service, ensure that it supports the message type your source or destination application require.

2.     Resource readiness with required skills

Your IT department resource and skill readiness are very important for the product/service you select. Prior experience of the service will help you expedite the adoption of the product/service. If all the product/services available are new to the team, it is a good idea to perform a quick PoC (Proof of Concept) to learn about the product before you decide. For example: If your IT team is more familiar with a specific OS based product, it will be easier for them to adopt a product/service which runs on that OS.

3.     Performance

Test the overall performance of the service against your business processes and ensure you are getting the required performance. Ensure to test it against the peak time workload so you know how much load a service/product can sustain. Also, look for the scalability of the product. For example: If you are looking a tax calculation service, ensure that roundtrip latency is optimal. Also, ensure that it can sustain peak load transactions like holiday shipping season for a retailer.

4.     Limitation and restrictions

It may be possible that the product/service is meeting your technical requirements currently. However, you need to check for any limitation or restriction of the product which may prevent you to use it when the technical attributes of your requirement changes. Also, ensure that if product/service has any restrictions. For example: If you are looking a backup services, ensure that it not only support the current database size, but the future database size of current growth as well.

5.     Interoperability and integration with other systems

When you use a service/product for one system, you probably going to use it with other systems as well. Check the interoperability and integration with other systems too, which may be a future consumer of this product/service. For example: A messaging service I choose, can I use it for both SAP, and non-SAP systems?

6.     Licensing

Check the licensing and usage policy of the product/services. Consider the future renewal cost as well. Some products/services may have upfront cost, others may have pay per use. For example: A product allow you to purchase once and use it at many places Vs. for every use you need a new license.

7.     Availability, SLA, and support

Based on the business requirements, you may have availability, and SLA requirements against the business process. You may want to ensure that selected product is meeting your availability and SLA requirements. You should also check the high availability and disaster recovery aspect of the service/product. It is also important to check their support hours. For example: The file conversion service has 8Hx5D support, would that be sufficient? What if service goes down on Saturday, can your business sustain it?

8.     Availability in your region

There may be country specific privacy requirements (Ex: GDPR). Using the service in your country may help you to comply with privacy policies. Also, service being available in your region may help to reduce the round-trip network latency.

9.     Maintenance overhead

Once you implement the service/product for the product usage, it is most likely you will use it for many years. You should consider the maintenance of the product/service. For example: If I use a service, I want to check with provider how many times a year I need to patch it. What is the upgrade cycle?

10. Roadmap of the product

In some cases, you would also want to learn the product/service roadmap. It will help you to determine if product will fulfill your future requirements, if any.  For example: If you plan to use chat bot in future, and if the product does not have that feature today, would it fulfil your bot requirement in near future?

Decision Table

The following table may help you to select the best services among the available one. Here is how you use this table:

1. Replace <Service1> and <Service2> with your services/products name.
2. Score 1 for the service which is most close to the question under the criteria section.
3. The service which scored most is your optimal choice.

*If both the services scored same, then make your judgment to select one.

Summary

It is never a binary answer to say, “use this service or product”. It always requires deep analysis. In most cases, when people ask which service to use, the most common answer is “It depends…”. Hopefully, this article, and above “Decision table” help you to make a best choice of services/products.