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Poster: The Eight Levels of Vendor Acceptance

30th September 2011 by 9 Comments

When working with your vendor, you might ask questions about, you know, …….stuff. You know, topics where you ask “Does your product do thing” or “Can you deliver this product by this date ?”. The answer that you are looking for is YES. The answer that you get from your vendor is never a YES , or, not directly. This handy guide is the eight levels of vendor acceptance where answers

Eight Steps of Vendor Acceptance (Click for Larger Image)

Other posts in the series

  1. Poster: Manager, Engineer, Architect, ITIL Consultant
  2. Poster: Keep Calm, Do Networks Everywhere
  3. Poster: Cloud Price Negotiations
  4. Poster: Cloud Kittens
  5. Poster: The Eight Levels of Vendor Acceptance (This post)
  6. Poster - Cisco VPN Client Licensing
  7. Poster: Servers, Tablets. Just Desktops and Printers to Go.
  8. Cisco and their Security Strategy
  9. Poster - Reassuringly Expensive
  10. Cisco Borderless Networks Motivational Marketing Poster
Filed Under: Featured, Posters Tagged With: ,
About Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro is a Network Engineer/Architect, mostly focussed on Data Centre, Security Infrastructure, and recently Virtualization. He has over 20 years in IT, in wide range of employers working as a freelance consultant including Finance, Service Providers and Online Companies. He is CCIE#6920 and has a few ideas about the world, but not enough to really count.

He is a host on the Packet Pushers Podcast, blogger at EtherealMind.com and on Twitter @etherealmind and Google Plus

  • Sto

    hahah cool stuff

  • Antal Gergely

    I think with a chinese vendor you have to reverse the order

  • Misha Gzirishvili

    Great post!
    I’ve got only first one from Juniper: “We are working on an answer for you”. Still waiting for an answer

  • smcarroll

    I believe you are forgetting the always important step 10, “Yes … and it actually works this time.”

  • Brandon Bennett

    Heh good, but there is a lot of work that goes into designing, developing, and testing a new feature so I kinda side with the vendors

    Then again I work for one so my views are many of those words have come out of my mouth at one point or another. 

     I would say one of the stronger words that a vendor can say is ‘no’.  Too many vendors will say ‘yes’ or ‘I think we may be able to do that with…(insert horrible network idea here).  Saying yes (even if it take 8 steps, can sometimes be a rocky road… especially if it took that long to get there)

  • Anonymous

    Great list. Nowadays #10 would be – awaiting results from patent trial.

  • Anonymous

    Greg, that is hilarious and spot on. I hear #4 a lot.

    • http://twitter.com/aliguo Ariel Liguori

      I agree #4 is the most common

  • Jwickander

    Sounds like you need new Vendors – Kendall Howard’s motto is the Answer is yes now whats the question –