By Deb Mielke
Network World,

Hopefully you'll get a chance to catch your breath while waiting for proposals to trickle in, because in a few weeks you'll have a stack of proposals to pore through. Grab the stack of proposals from your desk, start reading and complete your assessment forms. It's often best to read the vendor's bid more than once before grading. After grading, wait a day or two and grade the proposal again. You'll be surprised how your grades change.

Compile a list of questions for the vendor as you read through each bid. Did the vendor commit to 100% availability on the WAN? Doesn't that seem to be just a bit of an exaggeration? If an answer doesn't make sense, the vendor may have misunderstood the question.

Give vendors a chance to clarify their proposals, either in print or in person. You may choose to submit your questions to each vendor and request a written response, or you may choose to submit your questions and have vendors address them at their proposal presentation.

If a vendor is still claiming 100% WAN availability, you should probably place that proposal in the circular file. But if the vendor provides a satisfactory explanation for its claim, include the response in your vendor assessment. As you near the end of the assessment and question phase, you should have a very good idea which vendors can capably meet your needs.

The vendor presentations should be the icing on the cake and used as a final qualitative assessment of the candidates.

If none of the proposals meet your network requirements, your RFP efforts still haven't gone to waste. You may choose to only outsource the components of the RFP that vendors can meet. For example, if you often need to change your WAN addressing structure or router con-figurations with little notice, it might not be feasible to outsource router management. However, you still may want to outsource dial-up remote access to a provider that will handle hardware, software, dial-up access and security.

In any case, the RFP exercise will give you a comprehensive understanding of the network functions that are strategic to your business and can't be outsourced, as well as the tactical functions that make good outsourcing candidates.