I’ve been on the fence about dumping once of my outsourced solutions providers and bringing the functionality they provide in-house. We’ve been with them a long time, I have regular lunches with some of their VPs and trade phone calls with the CEO on a semi-regular basis. They’re good guys, we like each other. It’s all very friendly.

But business is business. I can save a nice sum of cash each year if I ditch them and bring the functionality in-house. But I didn’t pull the trigger on this during a round of cost cutting last year because the service was good and it was one less thing to worry about.

Lately tho, we’ve had some issues and we end up having to worry about some of the stuff anyway. Looking at the future roadmap, we want to go into a market they don’t service and we’d have to come up with the toolset to service those functions in that market from somewhere else anyway.

Then last week, a bug rears it’s head. A seemingly minor bug over there is causing daily doses of grief over here. We finally isolate it complete with process id’s and transaction numbers from their side and open a ticket last night. “Hi, your system has recently started doing X twice every night instead of just once. This causes problems over here because we key off of process-X”.

The response came in today:


"The Developers have looked at this and say that it is a very rare occurrence. We are not able to guarantee that [process-X never fires twice] as that would slow down the .... process significantly."


Okie then. We’ll muddle through on our own with that. And while we’re at it we may as well develop the entire toolkit over the next couple months and then we can send you our notice of termination.

Case closed and thanks for helping me with that decision.