In one recent case, the company chose not to purchase a packaged warehousing and distribution application, even though it met all of the company's functional requirements. Evaluating Vendors As well as checking standards conformance, the IS organization should evaluate a vendor of packaged applications in other ways. Cates of Airborne says a key evaluation criterion was whether the vendor had built its application using a layered architecture. Right now, many users at the company's ALS subsidiary use dumb terminals, but Airborne intends to migrate them to X terminals or Windows PCs. Another factor to consider is the ISV's financial health.
Nobody wants to be left with orphaned software.
That puts an IS organization back where it started, developing and maintaining key enterprise applications on its own. If users need service 24 hours a day, seven days a week, IS should make sure the ISV can provide it. Furthermore, there are personality issues. Most users don't require that ISVs have comprehensive product lines. In certain fields, such as warehousing and logistics, it's simply not possible to find large ISVs with broad product lines, says Cates.