Competitively sourcing your network infrastructure services can be regarded as something to be avoided.  Conducting a competitive Request for Proposal (“RFP”) process can be complicated and time consuming, all when the normal day job already keeps you far busier that you want to be.  Furthermore, a prevailing view can evolve that the benefits from changing vendor as a result of an RFP will never be large enough to overcome the cost, effort and heightened operational risk of executing the vendor change.  And regardless, your existing vendors always seem to give you a good deal when you extend their contracts, award them additional business, or conduct the annual benchmarking process…

But all of that misses the real value of RFP processes.  RFPs are change agents – the change delivered may be a change of vendor, a change of technology, a step change in cost/pricing, or some or all of those combined.  But without engaging the market, achieving transformational change and improvements in capabilities and performance is much harder to achieve, and realizing true step changes in the competitiveness of the pricing for the services you consume simply doesn’t happen. 

Forced migrations are common in IT, but you can avoid the worst by trading passivity for action ... plan and take charge. Trending in telecom today is speeding up the pace of migrations by replacing “incentives” with announcements that a service is going to be discontinued. However, customers still have a choice, they can move or they can go dark.

A forced service migration isn’t usually seen as a positive thing. What’s making them even worse is a new carrier tactic in which they insert provisions into contracts and service guides that make it impossible for a customer to migrate from a service that the carrier is planning to discontinue without either paying substantial termination fees or securing the carrier’s permission, which is conditioned on migrating to the carrier’s own substitute service at prices and terms that the carrier specifies.