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Unlike traditional industry analysts firms RedMonk tracks adoption, rather than sales, of technology by talking to the people that deploy it. The CIO is always the last to know<\/a> so we talk to practioners instead. We talk to the make-side, the makers and doers, the hackers and sysadmins that just get stuff done. Driven by Open Source and Cloud with their lower barriers to entry, sales and platform adoption are increasingly decoupled.<\/p>\n Yesterday in a post<\/a> about Zend’s new enterprise PHP server Stephen my business partner summed up the tragedy of enterprise software sales so well I thought to myself I really need to reiterate it.<\/p>\n Enterprises I worked with in a systems integration capacity would do the traditional dog and pony show, having vendors come in and pitting them against each other in bakeoff death matches which were guaranteed to be irrelevant to the actual project needs and unlikely to reveal anything more than the relative strength of the sales engineers in question. On this flawed process hung the technical fortunes of many an IT shop, so important was this platform.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I knew I wanted to use the quote, but in what context? Luckily Michael Krigsman offered up just the thing, in this post, Ugly Enterprise Software tactics<\/a>, which I came across this morning.<\/p>\n I believe selling useless licenses to\u00a0locked-in customers crosses the line of unethical behavior. Sales people who perpetuate this crap should lose their job.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Why don’t you say what you really think, Michael? His post was based on thoughts from my esteemed colleague\/competitor Ray Wang at Forrester who says stop selling products that clients<\/a> don’t need. Ray points to some tactics vendors use.<\/p>\n Here is the bottom line. We already thought vendor sales tactics were aggressive in a market that was growing for pretty much everyone – so what about now, in a downturn? Frankly things are worse now. Maintenance fees are hiking while customer profits are disappearing. Aggressive tactics are the norm.<\/p>\n In order to better fight their corner enterprises need to be smarter and more aggressive themselves. They should:<\/p>\n 1. Pay more attention to the people that actually do the work. Don’t buy software that your developers have no intention of using. Make sure architects are listening to developers.<\/p>\n 2. Consider offload options:<\/p>\n\n