Deciding what to buy, before a vendor decides it for you.

What we help you decide

• Whether to buy anything. A fair number of procurement projects are a process problem, and new software will encode it rather than fix it.
• Build or buy — with the maintenance cost of building on the table. That is the number missing from every internal business case we have read.
• Which vendor fits your constraints, rather than which one wrote the feature matrix everyone is comparing against.
• What the contract has to say. Exit terms, data ownership, what happens if they are acquired, and what renewal actually commits you to.

How we run a selection

• Requirements first, before anyone sees a demo. Requirements written afterwards are a description of the demo.
• We sit in the vendor sessions and ask the questions your team should not have to. The useful part of a vendor call is the follow-up nobody knew to request.
• We speak to customers the vendor did not nominate. Every reference list is a curated one, and the useful conversation is with the customer who left.
• We hand you a ranked recommendation and the strongest argument against it we can build.

When you do not need us

• You have bought this category before and know what you want. Run your own process; you will do it well and cheaper.
• The purchase is small enough that a poor decision can be reversed. Reversible mistakes are an inexpensive way to learn, and we would rather you kept the fee.
• Someone internal has the technical depth and no stake in the outcome. Use them. They know your constraints better than we will in a fortnight.

What you get

• 01

  A ranked recommendation, with the case against it made honestly.

• 02

  Requirements that predate the demos instead of describing them.

• 03

  The contract terms worth fighting for, and what each is worth trading.

• 04

  References we found ourselves, not the three the seller nominated.

Questions

What is technical procurement advisory?

Independent advice for an organisation buying technology — deciding whether to build or buy, writing the requirements, evaluating vendors, and negotiating the terms that matter. The defining feature is that the adviser is paid by the buyer and takes nothing from any vendor, so the recommendation does not need discounting for incentives.

Do you resell software or take vendor commissions?

No. We take no fee, commission, referral or rebate from any vendor, and we hold no reseller agreements. This is the whole reason to hire an independent adviser rather than take a systems integrator's recommendation for free.

Can you help with build versus buy?

Yes, and it is usually the real question. We put the maintenance cost of building on the table — the number internal business cases leave out — and we will tell you when the honest answer is that you should build, even though we do not build it for you.

Do you run the RFP process?

We can, or we can advise a process your own procurement team runs. Where a formal RFP is not required, we usually recommend against one: it produces comparable documents and tells you very little about how a vendor behaves when something goes wrong.

Is our organisation ready to buy AI?

That is a real question, and frequently the first one we answer. The AI purchases we have seen fail did not fail on the technology — they failed on data quality, an undefined process, or nobody owning the system. Finding that out before the contract is far cheaper than after.

Track record

Thirteen years of buying, building and assessing technology across 21 companies — payments infrastructure, decentralised finance, aviation and automotive. We have been the vendor in this process as often as the buyer.

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