[RBM] - How to choose the right vendor?
As I proposed, I'll now publish a few additional posts covering your requests and popular topics. Today we'll start with the most popular one: how to find a good vendor that will help your business.
Last month, I have talked to a frustrated CTO (from a really large organization) who had just spent six months and a significant portion of his budget on a vendor that promised the world but delivered chaos. His team was drowning in technical debt, support tickets went unanswered for weeks, and the "enterprise-grade" solution they'd purchased was anything but. "How did I get this so wrong?" he asked me. "They had all the right credentials, impressive case studies, and a polished sales team."
This conversation reminded me of my own painful vendor selection mistakes early in my career—and the hard-won lessons that followed. The truth is, selecting the appropriate vendor can be incredibly complicated, and the stakes are higher than ever. A big, well-known company isn't always the best choice, despite what their marketing materials might suggest. However, small and modern vendors can be risky too—you've asked me how to deal with that challenge, and I've learned that the answer lies not in company size or brand recognition, but in understanding what truly makes a vendor partnership successful.
After years of both successful collaborations and expensive mistakes, I've developed a lens that has served me well across dozens of vendor evaluations. I'll start with the factors that make a vendor a good choice. For me, these are: experience, open-source contribution, transparency, replaceable, quality of support, and stability.
Let's review each of them with real examples from my business experience.
Experience - This is my top factor when deciding on the right vendor. If you have a complicated system that requires years of experience and the vendor only has students working on it, there's a risk it's not the best choice. You need to evaluate the company in context—how experienced are they in the specific area you're looking for? This gets especially complicated with big companies that are totally new to certain areas, making it difficult to validate the skills they actually have in that particular domain. From my experience, big vendors can have such experience or should fake them to take into new area. Smaller providers usually when say we are specialized in this area, they are - this is their market, they will not want to make bad impressions. Trust me, I have my own micro-business and this is the last problem I want to have in my company.
Open-Source contribution - For me and plenty of enterprises I've worked with, this remains one of the key factors in choosing the right vendor. They want software that offers some version as open source, giving them the possibility to select other vendors for the same software or build internal skills on their own. In big open-source projects, there's also a chance to find people in the market who have contributed to the project before and will have a more in-depth understanding of how to utilize this software effectively. I was once hired thanks for my contribution to the python web framework Django. The current situation with Terraform and Redis is a good example that people take this factor very seriously.
Transparency - This is something I learned the hard way in my career. If a vendor can't tell you the truth or hides details about their company, there's a risk that picking them will be the wrong decision. Sometimes vendors think it's wrong to tell a big enterprise that they have only 5 people on their team. Based on my experience, I'll say it's not necessarily bad if you fit well with the other factors. If you're transparent that you're a small, experienced team with a great idea and that your client will help you grow, it creates a win-win situation. Big brand is not always a decision factor, transparency is chosen more often.
Replaceable - This concept resembles open-source thinking: how easily can you find other vendors offering the same software or equivalent features? You don't always need identical software—sometimes switching to another relational database, for example, gives you everything you need. The transition might even be inexpensive, requiring only minor changes. Many vendors also provide migration processes to ease these transitions. That was a big plus, and it doesn't need every time to be taken because the vendor is doing something wrong. You may be going another direction, for example, replacing your document database with a vector-document database to improve speed of searching, which is critical in your AI platform.
Quality of support - This is the trickiest factor I've encountered. Even major companies sometimes deliver poor support. Research thoroughly and ask others about their experiences with specific vendor support services. Watch for this alarming support pattern: "Send us all your logs, tell us your software version, update to the newer version, send more logs, provide version details, share your configuration, then change your software or configuration." In most cases, they'll find something that doesn't match their ideal recommendations, making your software "unsupportable." I've witnessed this with one of the biggest IT vendors. This approach either makes your systems unsupportable or drives up support costs—time is money when you require help. You'll end up engaging multiple engineers or hiring external consultants to resolve issues. Be cautious about this red flag.
Stability - This is my final factor, though it doesn't mean you should automatically choose the oldest, largest company in the market. Size and longevity don't guarantee reliability or quality service. Instead, examine the people behind the company and how they approach partnerships with you. Look at their track record of client retention, their communication style during the sales process, and whether they view you as a long-term partner or just another transaction.
Relationship stability—how the vendor builds lasting connections with clients—matters far more than company age or size. A smaller, newer company with strong leadership and a genuine commitment to client success can often provide more personalized attention and flexibility than a corporate giant where you're just another account number. Pay attention to how they handle challenges, their responsiveness to your concerns, and whether their values align with your organization's culture and expectations.
Those are the key factors I use to select vendors, whether we're talking about software, team leasing, or advanced consulting.
What factors do you use when choosing vendors? Share them in the comments below.