One of the easy things to do when discussing the products and services available on the market is to wax lyrical about the way the market is going, the best solutions that you can buy and the most cost effective results you can achieve. And in an extremely dynamic industry, such as IT, there is plenty to talk about. We all know that there are constantly evolving solutions and a parade of suppliers who can provide them.

But rather than talk about the best technology, I think it would be useful just to swing the debate over to the issue of the Supplier. Recently one of our customers, 'The Firewall Warehouse' implemented a broadband VPN for it's 3 offices and centralised warehouse that are spread across the UK.

Nick Johnson, Director of The Firewall Warehouse said, 'For the management team the technological argument and the financial benefit derived was not really an issue. Where we struggled was with our choice of supplier.'

Johnson went on, 'the problem was that we treated the sale as a commodity and didn't really respect the fact that connecting our business up and passing our vital data between sites was, in reality, one of the most important things on our agenda. Sure, we understood it all, but we really should have made sure that we understood the product source, the delivery schedule, the time we needed to invest and the fact that those who provide you with critical solutions need to be close to you and your business.'

'As it so happens we ended up with a good delivery and a solution that is fast, robust, capable and secure, but only after we realised that we were not paying enough attention to the deal and consequently put our own management efforts into play, which incidentally was not that arduous.'

The lessons 'The Firewall Warehouse' learnt were that you need to do a bit of basic research yourself before kicking off the supplier process.

The web is a fantastic source of information, as we all know and by searching 'VPN network' 'managed VPN', 'managed broadband', and a few other similar phrases, it is possible to become that much brighter and informed. But equally important is to understand what is behind the marketing web pages, what do the network providers actually do?

Now, even in the commodity sale, not all vendors offer the same product or service. For a start, don't ever believe that broadband is just broadband. It comes in various guises and is delivered with varying levels of quality and efficiency.

Some of the better known names do not necessarily offer you the best quality broadband and quite frankly the delivery and customer care capabilities are woefully inadequate for the small and medium sized business. So it's important to understand your vendors offering. What contention rates and speeds are on offer for a start? And if you can get into a discussion with a supplier about this you will find that one who has knowledge of the topic and an understanding of how best to network a business will really give you that added comfort.

Additionally you need to know how good the service is and there are two issues that need some real clarity. The first of these is Reliability.

Now the answer to reliability is not just a simple claim of being reliable. What you need to be told is the structure of the network and an explanation of how they intend to provide you with the usual spiel about 99.999999% guaranteed uptime. This revolves around how they have built their network and how they can demonstrate a lack of network congestion. The least reliable infrastructure will be the one that packs as many people as it can on to a limited network. Conversely, the better network is that which can cope with lots of traffic as well as having a lot of free capacity.

Which brings up the second issue; namely that of Latency. This again needs explained to you by the supplier and they need to convince you that there is low latency on their network because they are being generous with the capacity and not overburdening their infrastructure with users. It's the same issue as that of reliability; less conscientious suppliers will push lots of traffic across a smaller network, whereas more conscientious vendors will make sure that there is loads of capacity and will be able to talk confidently about their high reliability and low latency.

Whilst you are digging deep into the knowledge bank of your supplier you would also be well advised to talk to them about the provision of voice over the managed VPN. Voice can be run across your broadband VPN, but not all suppliers really know how to do this or are capable of doing it. But be aware, this is something that is happening and will become more and more popular. Because of this a good supplier will be either encouraging you to run voice over your managed VPN now or setting your expectations to do it as part of your medium term planning.

But knowing about the technology and how it applies to you is important, but equally so is their knowledge of process. So many times you can place orders and then be lost in a sea of promises. A good supplier will guide you as to what they will do, but also as to what you need to do. You don't need to spend hours on working with the supplier but you do need to be in synch with their programme and understand what they are delivering, when they are delivering and basically when to flick the switch.

A good supplier will have a combination of automation and human resource. You should expect to be able to be given an online service to manage and indeed provision your service, but likewise you should know the service agent who is in charge of your project. Invariably you will have questions, date slippages, configuration changes and so on and you want that piece of mind that your supplier works with you to change the schedule and meet your demands. Do watch out for this because once you lose track of what you and they are doing it becomes an absolute muddle of spaghetti to unravel.

Other simple things to look out for are the speed and simplicity of the supplier process. Automation of process invariably means that line orders are placed quickly, but you need to understand their acknowledgment process and update process so that you are comfortable with what information you expect to be fed to you over the order lifetime. Likewise you need to actually understand how the installation takes place. It should be a speedy delivery of a box, a speedy delivery of a connection or connections and a harmonious bringing together of the items to create your managed VPN. If you can't see that nice clear plan from your supplier then be warned that it all might not be plain sailing.

So don't panic, but just be conscious of getting stuck in to some of the detail when you are evaluating your supplier. This is absolutely not just about price. It's about their knowledge of how to create and run a project and it's about the network they use to provide it. It's also about how they efficiently supply you and appraise you along the way as well as their ability to persuade you of their business and technological integrity.

It's a fun thing to be able to make your business better and I also think that your supplier will actually want to be part of that journey too. So do probe and ask questions about some of the issues raised and I'm sure you will find your choice of supplier to be much easier and fairly natural. Like most choices the most appropriate one is fairly obvious once you know which questions to ask.

Nathan Hill-Haimes is the Managing Director of Managed Communications Ltd and a serial entrepreneur, having built, sold and turned around several Internet centric companies prior to founding Managed Communications - http://www.managedcomms.co.uk

Managed Communications is a high-performance Managed VPN Service provider - the company does not use the public internet to create VPNs as experience has shown this is where many issues regarding latency and security can occur. In addition to standard VPN services bonding of lines enables higher capacity than other service providers can offer to key VPN sites.