In our last newsletter we discussed the first steps that Mike Fratto and we took to create an RFI for data center LAN switching. We are going to use this newsletter to discuss the process of choosing vendors to receive the RFI.
One approach that IT organizations can take to choosing which vendors to receive an RFI is to essentially not choose and to send the RFI to every possible vendor. You might take that approach if you were trying to get a broad view of a rapidly changing technology or service and hence wanted to get a lot of different inputs. This approach, of course, is more viable if there are not too many possible vendors, as a large number of vendors will result in a lot of work reviewing their responses.
If you do decide to distribute the RFI to a large number of vendors, you might want to consider creating a relatively brief RFI and using the responses to the RFI to create a short list of vendors with whom you will engage in more detailed dialogue.
Another alternative is to only distribute the RFI to a select set of vendors. The challenge, of course, is determining which vendors receive the RFI. There are many criteria that you can use including your familiarity with the vendors, their market share or how well they are perceived by your peers and/or by industry analysts. In most cases this decision is political and there are no hard and fast guidelines for how the decision should be made.
That said, once the team that is creating the RFI makes that decision it is critical that they get the buy-in from upper management. The last thing you want to have happen is to go through the entire RFI process only to have senior management instruct you to send the RFI out to one or more additional vendors. At that point you are essentially starting over.
In the case of our data center LAN switching RFI we decided to give the RFI to all of the obvious LAN switching vendors. This technology is changing very rapidly and we wanted to get input from as many viable vendors as possible. While that meant we did not have to arm wrestle each other over who would receive the RFI, we did come across a curious challenge. Since both Mike and we have been writing about this process, vendors who sell data center products other than LAN switches approached us in the belief that they should also receive the RFI. Since we want to keep the process focused on LAN switching, we did not distribute the RFI to this set of vendors.
We will continue to keep you apprised of how the RFI process is going. In the meantime we want to remind our readers that Mike and Jim are going to analyze the responses to the RFI and use them as the basis for two sessions at the forthcoming Interop conference in New York City. One of the sessions is entitled “Evaluating New Data Center LAN Architectures” and the other session is entitled “Designing The Next Generation Data Center LAN”. If your organization is considering redesigning your data center LAN you should attend these sessions to jump-start your knowledge of what your alternatives are.
