Should you allow your software vendor to provide services to your project, such as implementation services? Should you allow your services provider to create large blocks of custom code for you? Before I answer these questions, let me outline the skills differences a software vendor needs versus those of a services provider in order to do their daily work.

Who’s Who?
Software vendors write software that they sell to the public. Service providers help you with specific tasks, either because you need an extra hand or because you lack the specific expertise that they bring.

Software vendors sometimes provide services as well as sell software, which means that some software vendors are also service providers. Keep in mind that these are two entirely different tasks however, and, for the purposes of implementation, you should consider them separate in your RFP evaluations.

Service providers not only provide a variety of services, including customizing your LIMS product using some form of coding language, but they will also write an entire custom solution for you. Theoretically, when a service provider writes code, especially an entirely custom solution, they become a software vendor, but let’s leave theory out of this particular discussion.

Their Focus
A software vendor builds software for a “market.” A service provider works with an individual customer. On that note, building software for a particular customer and then expanding it to meet a market’s needs might provide software that isn’t as flexible as something that was initially created with the “market” in mind.

You can sometimes tell when a service provider has created something for a particular customer that they are trying to sell to other customers. Similarly, you can tell when a software vendor is trying to sell you a less-than-properly researched module, as the options don’t quite fit the industry, and the names of the items in the module are specific to the original customer’s needs and confusing to everyone else.

Software Build
There is a difference between building software for a market and for an individual customer. Software vendors should select a specific methodology to follow, which means that documentation and changes should remain fairly consistent across their versions of software.

Service providers often make the methodology and documentation consistent with the company or division’s standards to which they are providing service. This is partially done so the customer can more easily maintain it all, if desired or required.

Mindset
Here are the generalizations that people in the industry like to throw at each other:

• Software vendors think there’s nothing better than their software and can’t understand why you’d want to change it.
• Services providers think the software stinks and should be highly modified to meet each customer’s needs.