You will receive 5 points for this exercise. The exercise is tutor-scored. You will receive one point for attempting to complete this exercise, and an additional point for responding to each of the four questions posed below.
When you have completed the exercise, enter your response in the text box below.
You have been assigned the task of building a critical e-business application for your company. You have already decided that it would take too long to build it from scratch, so you sent out a Request for Proposal (RFP) to five vendors that offer
packaged e-business solutions. After sending you information on his product, the first vendor calls you to follow up and makes the following pitch: "There are three reasons you should buy our product:
- If you choose us, you will never need to work with another e-business vendor again. Our technology is so special and unique, we are the only providers of programming support. In short, if you buy our solution, you will have the best performing solution on the market, no one else can touch us."
- Even though you might have your doubts because you heard that we had to restate third quarter earnings, we will hold the source in escrow for you, providing you all the protection you need.
- We have found that many of the standards used on the Web are too slow, so we've added our own tags to HTML, our own object model, our own integration and transport language, and our own systems management messaging protocol.
Your task is to evaluate this vendor's offer with respect to the standards considerations discussed in this lesson.
Then, enter you evaluation in the text box below. In your evaluation, you should explicitly answer the following four questions. Your score will be based on whether you try to answer each of these questions.
- Will this solution facilitate or obstruct possible relationships with other vendors now and in the future?
- Is this solution compatible with other architectures?
- Can this solution be integrated with the applications your company now uses?
- Are third-party resources easily found and employed?
