Vendor Evaluation Tool

Used TrustRadius to evaluate new business intelligence platforms and ETL tools. This was used during the exploration process of tool finding to evaluate what is currently on the marketplace and see what others within the industry are using to provide services to their clients. My role was as a power user to test trial product keys and evaluate if they fulfilled our requirements.

I was not part of the discussion on pricing and sourcing of this product and did not have direct line to vendors [on] TrustRadius during our use of the product.

We used Gartner for many years prior and actually really enjoyed the magic quadrants they provide as a quick glance towards market movers & shakers. Their expertise with the softwares and vetting processes were always thorough so we could trust their reviews; however, we did notice that while they had SME's evaluate products it was hard to get a grasp of how the tool performed daily business functions at a very micro level, which is where we used TrustRadius to fill in that gap of knowledge.

Very much liked the Magic Quadrant for a quick overview of tools within a marketplace, would recommend using them as a good way to get a glance of available tools and where they stood in terms of innovation or usability. Would prefer that TrustRadius implement something similar to provide quick insights but also could lead to drilling down into a lower level of detail immediately which is what the magic quadrant reports provided.

We might use product scores or ratings to at a very basic level filter down to a short list of products that are highly reviewed/rated; however, since vendor tools are so much subjective to whatever the user is trying to get out of them we typically ignore ratings in later stages of discussions since our use cases might differ greatly from industry or individual use cases.

Finding reputable reviews, acquiring trial licenses or product demonstrations. It ultimately only changed our timelines of how quickly we could evaluate products within a short window of each other but in the long run did not prove to be an impact on deciding what products we wanted to shortlist & move to further stages with.