{"id":10182,"date":"2026-08-31T08:51:22","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T06:51:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qdata.pl\/blog\/cloud-rfp-how-to-compare-vendors-without-the-deck\/"},"modified":"2026-09-01T02:31:44","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T00:31:44","slug":"cloud-rfp-how-to-compare-vendors-without-the-deck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qdata.pl\/de\/blog\/cloud-rfp-how-to-compare-vendors-without-the-deck\/","title":{"rendered":"Cloud-Ausschreibung: Drei Anbieter vergleichen \u2014 ohne Folienvergleich"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"qdata-blog-tldr\">\n<h3>TL;DR<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Issue one <strong>RFP template<\/strong> with fixed sections \u2014 vendors that ignore structure reveal how they will operate day two.<\/li>\n<li>Score five dimensions equally: scope clarity, SLA honesty, restore evidence, admin\/tenant model, <strong>total cost at +30% growth<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<li>Weight <strong>first 90 days<\/strong> heavier than migration price \u2014 cheap entry with chaotic onboarding costs more than a higher monthly fee.<\/li>\n<li>Run a joint clarification call; document answers in writing before final scoring.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<p>We sat in a review session where three cloud proposals lay open: one led with Kubernetes, one with \u201cdigital transformation\u201d, one with the lowest monthly fee. The board asked which to choose. Nobody could answer \u2014 because each vendor used different units, different SLA definitions, and different assumptions about who patches the ERP database.<\/p>\n<p>RFPs fail when they become beauty contests. They succeed when they force comparable answers. This guide gives mid-market firms a practical matrix \u2014 not a forty-page procurement template \u2014 to compare managed cloud and infrastructure offers fairly.<\/p>\n<h2>Fix the structure before you fix the price<\/h2>\n<p>Send every vendor the same outline and page limit:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Scope table (in \/ out \/ optional)<\/li>\n<li>SLA and escalation (severity definitions, on-call coverage)<\/li>\n<li>Backup\/restore evidence (see our backup checklist article)<\/li>\n<li>Admin and tenant model (who owns Azure\/AWS tenant, break-glass)<\/li>\n<li>Onboarding plan \u2014 first 90 days week by week<\/li>\n<li>Pricing: monthly, project assumptions, egress\/storage model, example at +30% capacity<\/li>\n<li>Exit: data export, DNS, credential handover, notice period<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Vendors who submit only marketing PDFs fail the first filter. Serious operators fill the table even if some cells say \u201cnot included\u201d.<\/p>\n<h2>The scoring matrix (example weights)<\/h2>\n<p>Use a simple 1\u20135 score per dimension; committee members score independently, then compare.<\/p>\n<table>\n<thead>\n<tr>\n<th>Dimension<\/th>\n<th>What \u201c5\u201d looks like<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td>Scope clarity<\/td>\n<td>Named systems, patch boundaries, DB admin yes\/no explicit<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>SLA honesty<\/td>\n<td>Severity-1 response time, 24\/7 or documented gap + your escalation role<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>Restore proof<\/td>\n<td>Restore report &lt; 90 days, RPO\/RTO tied to your tiers<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>Admin model<\/td>\n<td>Your tenant, their least-privilege ops, break-glass documented<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>Total cost (+30%)<\/td>\n<td>Worked example includes projects, egress, your internal hours<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>First 90 days<\/td>\n<td>Inventory, landing zone, one pilot migration, access review dated<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>References<\/td>\n<td>Similar size\/industry, speakable contact, not only logo wall<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<p>Do not let sales weight \u201cstrategic partnership\u201d unless it comes with named engineers and runbooks.<\/p>\n<h2>Questions that separate operators from resellers<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Who is on call for our account at 03:00?<\/strong> Named pool vs anonymous \u201cNOC\u201d. <strong>What is excluded from unlimited support?<\/strong> Read the footnotes. <strong>How do you handle our internal change freeze in December?<\/strong> Shows operational maturity. <strong>What happens if we exceed egress budget?<\/strong> Surprises kill CFO trust.<\/p>\n<h2>Common traps in mid-market RFPs<\/h2>\n<p>Comparing monthly fee only while one vendor includes migration days and another bills every day. Letting the cheapest bid win without restore drill requirement. Accepting \u201cISO certified datacentre\u201d as substitute for your application backup. Choosing multi-cloud slideware when you need one landing zone and one on-call number.<\/p>\n<h2>After scoring: one pilot, not big-bang<\/h2>\n<p>Before full contract signature, agree a paid or fixed-price pilot: migrate one non-critical workload, run one restore test, execute one incident simulation. Score again after 90 days. Contracts signed on faith alone revert to slide comparisons the first time ERP slows down.<\/p>\n<p><!-- qdata-expand-v1 --><\/p>\n<h2>How a scoring session actually works<\/h2>\n<p>We run vendor comparisons as a 90-minute workshop, not as a spreadsheet emailed around for two weeks. Four people in the room is enough: someone who owns money (CFO or controller), someone who owns operations (IT or plant), someone who will live with tickets (the person who already opens them), and one facilitator who is not selling a platform. Each person scores the seven dimensions independently on paper first. Then you put numbers on a whiteboard. The interesting part is never the average \u2014 it is the <strong>spread<\/strong>. If IT gives \u201crestore proof\u201d a 2 and sales gives it a 5, you have found a slide that nobody verified.<\/p>\n<p>Typical mid-market mistake: the CEO joins for the last fifteen minutes and picks the vendor who \u201csounded most strategic.\u201d Counter it by agreeing <em>before<\/em> the session that any score below 3 on restore proof or admin model is a veto, regardless of monthly fee. We have used that rule three times in the last year. Twice it eliminated the cheapest bid. Once it eliminated the most expensive \u201ctransformation partner\u201d who could not name an on-call engineer.<\/p>\n<h2>A worked +30% cost example you can copy<\/h2>\n<p>Take a 120-person manufacturer with 28 VMs, one ERP, mail already in Microsoft 365, and a customer portal. Vendor A: PLN 18,000 \/ month \u201call inclusive\u201d, 12 migration days included, egress \u201cfair use\u201d, restore tests \u201con request\u201d. Vendor B: PLN 24,500 \/ month, 20 migration days included, egress priced, quarterly restore drill in the fee, named 24\/7 pool. At +30% capacity (eight more VMs, 40% more storage, one extra environment for ERP upgrade):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Vendor A: monthly jumps via change requests we have seen land at +PLN 6\u20139k, plus 8\u201312 extra project days in year one that were \u201cobviously out of scope\u201d.<\/li>\n<li>Vendor B: +PLN 4.2k in the published price book, restore drill still included, no surprise for the test environment if it was in the +30% example they already calculated.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The cheaper cover page is often more expensive by month nine. Ask both vendors to fill the <em>same<\/em> +30% sheet with your numbers, not theirs. If they refuse, they are not ready to operate you \u2014 they are ready to invoice you.<\/p>\n<h2>Clarification call: eight questions, forty minutes<\/h2>\n<p>After written proposals, do one joint call per vendor. Record it (with consent) and write answers into the scoring sheet the same day. Questions we actually use:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Who is on call for our account at 03:00 on a Sunday \u2014 named pool or a ticket queue in another country?<\/li>\n<li>Show the last restore report for a client with an ERP like ours. Redact names; keep timestamps and duration.<\/li>\n<li>What is excluded from \u201cunlimited support\u201d in the first year? Read the footnote aloud.<\/li>\n<li>If Active Directory is compromised, who has break-glass, and where is that documented?<\/li>\n<li>How do you handle our December change freeze \u2014 and who pays if a security patch cannot wait?<\/li>\n<li>Walk through the first 90 days week by week. If week three is \u201cTBD\u201d, they do not have an onboarding machine.<\/li>\n<li>What happens if we leave in month 18 \u2014 data export format, DNS, credential handover, last invoice items?<\/li>\n<li>Which of our systems will you <em>not<\/em> touch, and who patches those?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Operators answer with names, dates and \u201cnot included\u201d. Resellers answer with architecture diagrams and \u201cwe can discuss in the next workshop\u201d.<\/p>\n<h2>What we decline to bid on<\/h2>\n<p>When QData is invited to an RFP, we sometimes walk away. A 12-page slide deck as the only submission format. A requirement for \u201cmulti-cloud from day one\u201d with no workload that needs it. A demand for 99.99% on a single-site ERP with no budget for a second site. An invitation to undercut an incumbent by 40% with the same scope \u2014 that number is a lie waiting to become a change request. Saying no is part of knowing this market. The firms that stay and invent scope later are the ones CFOs remember unkindly.<\/p>\n<p>Related reading: <a href=\"\/de\/blog\/backup-restore-what-to-demand-before-you-sign\/\">backup evidence<\/a> belongs in every cloud RFP; <a href=\"\/de\/blog\/how-to-choose-managed-cloud-50-200-employees\/\">managed cloud for 50\u2013200 people<\/a> covers the operating model this matrix assumes.<\/p>\n<h2>What to do next<\/h2>\n<p>Download your last three vendor emails into one folder \u2014 if they do not share a common outline, restart the RFP with this structure. Our <a href=\"\/de\/service\/cloud-services\/\">Cloud-Dienste<\/a> team helps mid-market firms write neutral scope documents and score responses from an operations perspective \u2014 architecture and runbooks, not licence shelfware.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><span data-no-translation>Drei Angebote, drei Logos, null Vergleichbarkeit. Bewertungsmatrix f\u00fcr den Mittelstand: Scope, SLA, Restore-Nachweis, Admin-Modell, Wachstumspreise und Exit \u2014 Entscheidung nach Fakten, nicht Animation.<\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10158,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business-guides"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qdata.pl\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qdata.pl\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qdata.pl\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qdata.pl\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qdata.pl\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qdata.pl\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10182\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qdata.pl\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qdata.pl\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qdata.pl\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qdata.pl\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}