Savvy negotiations smooth Kenexa's shelfware struggle

Shelfware sometimes comes by way of a trusted vendor offering to improve the capabilities of a product already deployed. That was the case for Kamal Jain, director of ASP operations at Kenexa in Waltham, Mass., who wanted to get more out of data being collected by an existing vendor's monitoring system.

Click to see: Kamal Jain, director of ASP operations at Kenexa

Impressed with a service-level monitoring console that Mercury Interactive (acquired last year by HP) offered as an add-on to his existing software, Jain negotiated with the vendor to ditch the "very expensive perpetual license" and instead use the product for a year, paying just the annual maintenance cost.

"It looked fantastic on paper and in demonstrations, but over the course of the year, we never got it up and running to the point where we could use it, and just threw it away," he says. "The interface was so different and it required certain changes to our existing monitoring methodology and configuration to the point where the additional investment of time and effort would have been huge."

Jain opted to cut his losses. “The time and money we did invest was written off, and I took personal responsibility for it,” he says. On the positive side, he did avoid some $100,000 in capital spending because of his savvy pre-purchase negotiations.

"While it would appear that I wasted the company's money, I was able to maintain my credibility because of the open and collaborative approach we took to it. Some gambles pay off and some don't.”

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