建立与买入。

几年前，我正在与Splunk合同谈判，我们一直遇到了像一个非常不合理的定价结构的内容。他们希望为三年许可证的数百万美元，这是一个高价格，以便在特定顺序中支付三十二个ASCII字符。即使有许可证，我们仍然是操作它并支付运行能力的那些。

我们决定通过计算运行自己的成本来洽谈麋鹿堆栈集群，通过适当的固体数和手挥发的解决方案确定。我们利用此计算来建立Splunk的价值并最终得到了Splunk到我们计算的价值而不是他们的费用结构，虽然我怀疑我们可能会过高的价值并在此处降落太高zone of possible agreement.

最近Calm一直在考虑我们是否应该将部分工作流程移动到一个headless CMSes因此，因此，我一直在思考如何制作这些类型的构建与购买决策，特别是如何评估“购买”方面。最终，我认为它归结为风险，价值和成本。

风险

使用供应商正在承担未偿还的债务。您知道您将不得不为债务随着时间的推移提供债务的兴趣，并且他们可能会在任何时候都会呼吁债务。

从风险的角度来看，呼吁债务是持有的贷款人，持有巨大的金额，尽管当然，如果竞争一点，价格上涨的风险是真实的。Rather, the most severe risks are the vendor going out of business, shifting their pricing in a way that’s incompatible with your usage, suffering a severe security breach that makes you decide to stop working with them, or canceling the business line (which some claim has undermined Google’s abiltiy to gain traction on new platforms).

Some risks can be managed through legal contracts. Other risks can be managed by purchasing insurance. Other sorts you simply have to decide whether they’re acceptable.

在构建与购买决定中，大多数公司将大部分能量放在识别风险的情况下，识别其位置，但经常在强大的状态下达到高潮not invented here剥夺核心事业的文化。为了避免这种命运，至少花费至少时间价值来自买决定。

价值

Businesses succeed by selling something useful to their users. Work directly towards that end is core work, and all other work is auxiliary work. Well-run, efficiency-minded businesses generally allocate just enough resources to auxiliary work to avoid bottlenecks in their core work, reserving the majority of their resources for core work. This efficiency-obsession is a subtle mistake, because it treats auxiliary work as cost centers disconnected from value creation.

In reality, value is created by the overall system, which includes auxiliary work. Many companies create more value from their auxiliary work than their core work, for example a so-so product supported by extraordinary marketing efforts. Other companies sabotage their core work by underinvesting in the auxiliaries, for example a company of engineers eternally awaiting design guidance.

要计算供应商的价值，请比较供应商的发行，以根据您今天愿意建立的内容。完善的内部工具总是比供应商的当前产品更好，但您现在不会立即建立完善的内部工具，是什么将要你实际构建吗?

此外，两种方法的质量和能力如何随时间发散？大多数公司，特别是小的公司，根本无法理性地投资于改善其内部工具，使得它们随着时间的推移而变得更糟。如果您认为相反，请挖掘这些假设。销售这些内部工具的供应商具有与您完全不同的激励结构，并且这是一个激励结构，要求他们在其产品中进行持续投资。

At a certain point you may reach your own internal economies of scale that support ongoing investment into internal tooling. Uber famously built their own replacement for both Greenhouse and Zendesk after reaching about 2,000 engineers, but they relied on vendors extensively up until they reached that point.

One way that folks sometimes discount vendors' value to zero is they worry that the vendor simply won’t be good enough to use at all. This implies the existence of a boolean cutoff in quality between sufficient and insufficient quality. This is a rigid mindset that doesn’t reflect reality: quality is not boolean. There will be gaps in vendor functionality, and you should absolutely identify those gaps and understand the cost of addressing them, but avoid falling into a mindset that your requirements are fixed absolutes.

在建立与购买时，经常重复但很少遵循智慧是好的建议：如果你是一家科技公司, vendors usually generate significant value if they’re outside your company’s core competency; within your core competency, they generally slow you down.

成本

一旦您了解供应商可以带来的价值，您必须考虑成本。需要考虑的主要成本是：集成，财务，运营和进化。

Integration costs在供应商开始创建值之前，您的前期成本是您的前期成本。如果目前的供应商在将来的某个观点停止存在，这也是更换供应商的成本。这是大多数供应商讨论的地方花费大多数时间。

财务费用are how much the contract costs, including projecting utilization over time to understand future costs. This is another area that usually gets a great deal of attention during vendor selection processes, but often with a bit too much emphasis on cost-cutting and not enough on value.

运营成本are the cost of using the vendor, and in my experience are rarely fully considered. This includes things like vendor outages or degradations, as well as more nuanced issues like making mandatory integration upgrades as the vendor evolves their platform. Stripe’sPayment Intents API更强大的比previous收费API.，但是，了解一个更强大的解决方案之间存在巨大的差距，去年学习PSD2’s SCA requirementsmeant you had to upgrade to keep selling to buyers in the European Union.

How you want to use a vendor will shift over time, which makesevolution costs需要考虑，并且类似于运营成本是忽视的考虑因素。这是供应商建筑很重要的地方，设计精心设计的供应商闪耀。良好的供应商架构的一个例子是headless CMSes：它们是灵活的，因为它们的重点是促进一件工作流程。如果某些工作流程不适合您支持的利基工作流程，只需将一块从无头CMS剪切：您不必立即更换整件事。

Some vendor solutions try to create a crushing gravity that restricts efforts to move any component outside their ecosystem, and these are the vendors to avoid. Folks often focus on things like being vendor-agnostic, e.g. the ability to wholesail migrate from one vendor to another, when I think it’s usually more valuable to focus on being vendor-flexible: being able to move a subset of your work to a better suited tool.

Your total cost model should incorporate all of these costs, and becomes a particularly powerful tool in negotiating the contract.

把它全部拉到一起

一旦你通过价值，风险和成本的想法，那么在某些时候你必须做出决定。我的拇指规则是首先了解是否有足够高的风险，即你根本无法前进。如果风险是可接受的，则执行简单的值与成本计算并接受结果！

一般来说，我所看到的两个经常性主题是这种令人醒目的明显方法是法律审查（超出了不太可能或可减的风险）和令人不安的预算（总体上使用供应商的总体预算，但公司意见是将军预算和供应商预算，因为这种情况存在于多层的预算。

These are both sorts of bureaucratic scar tissue that accumulate from previous misteps, and aim to protect the business. On average, they likely are creating the right outcomes for the company, but for specific decisions they might not be. If you believe strongly enough that this is one of those exceptions, then ultimately I’ve found you need an executive sponsor to push it through.

A note on vendor management

Throwing in one more thought before wrapping this up, I’ve found that many companies are相当糟糕at vendor management and arequite good在建立东西。因此，他们的计算总是表明供应商比建立自己更糟糕，这对他们目前的国家可能是真实的。

To get the full value from vendors, you have to invest in managing vendors well. A company that does this extraordinarily well is Amazon, who issue their vendors quarterly report cards grading their performance against the contract and expectations. Getting great results from vendors requires managing them. If you neglect them and get bad results, that’s on you.