Glad Gartner is giving advice we have been providing our clients for a while now. That with clouds and SaaS reducing the time to provision and making bite-size the unit of procurement, the practice of locked in 5+ year contracts and 9 month procurement cycles will go the way of the dodo.
Till they do, though we recommend clients fight for benchmarking clauses, and to benchmark vendors not just against traditional competitors - but against disruptive market entrants from cloud, SaaS and newer offshore markets. We also add – negotiate early termination clauses aggressively. Make sure they amortize down with the contract term.
Ironically, we have to tell clients not to rely too much on Gartner for IT (or Hackett for BPO) or other “industry leading” benchmarks. We find they lag disruptive trends in markets and are actually defensive of status quo.
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