Today’s fast-evolving technology space forces product companies to be the “First in the market” if they want to survive and remain profitable. This in turn exerts immense pressure on the software development groups to be as quick as possible. Along with cost benefits, functional area complexities and expertise, this drives a number of software companies to take “buy” rather than “make” decisions about functionalities in their overall products.

This buy decision is taken in tandem with phases of evaluation, selection and contract with vendors providing particular functionalities. It’s not necessary that vendors are always external to a company. Many product companies, in fact, have a culture of creating in-house functionality teams. Hence there arises a need for inter team vendor-customer relationships within a company.

There are certain operational challenges imposed by having vendors on a software product. Of course companies have contracts to circumvent known problems but such contracts cannot take care of every possible anomaly. Characteristic challenges faced by vendor management team can be grouped in two major categories

Defect Tracking: When a defect is found in a vendor software, how do we fix it, and what should be the timeline for doing so? How do we report the problem to them? Where to get support for debugging problems related to the vendor software? These are some of the questions that face the company. Add to that the possibility wherein the vendor functionality and product functionality are interdependent, the scene becomes really muddled as to who fixes the bugs, and how.

Keeping pace with new technology: Suppose we want some new features/enhancements to enrich our product. The question that arises then is can the vendor functionality teams do it? If so, under what time frame? Moreover, in such a case, how do we make sure this does not break old functionalities?