As part of your Identity Manager vendor selection one important steps is to allow vendors to demo their solution. Organizations should have a demo agenda that will allow them to control and manage the demo pace. Also, having a demo agenda, organizations will give the opportunity to the vendors to demo and explain their solution while being sure to treat each one equally.
A demo session(s) for a vendor, but depending on the size of the organization deployment and use cases, it can take between 1 to 3 days. As a result for multiple participation in different demo sessions, you will find below a simple agenda for a demo session.
7 items to consider in your demo sessions agenda
1. Introductions.
Organization needs to keep this brief but make sure everybody in both teams (organization & vendor) details their role in the process. Organization needs to make sure the entire selection team can attend all demos.
2. Vendor overview.
Vendor general speech about their background and how they approached the RFP.
3. Solution introduction
Vendors presents their solution having emphasis in discuss the architecture, user experience, AI features, and overall approach how their solution might resolve the organization use cases.
4. Use Case demos
This the key element for the demo, here is where the organization how the vendor solution will “fit” the use cases to be implemented. Organization needs to make sure that everyone in the selection team is using the same evaluation form.
5. Review Q&A.
Organization as part of their proposal review, should have a set of question related to the use case. This is the opportunity for them to ask those.
6. Private meeting
Organization should take some time after getting their questions responded, to go and meet privately to generate the major question and biggest concern about he solution. Some important question might be related to the customer support, product life cycle, future product roadmap,etc.
7. Final questions
Organization conduct the final questions round and wrap-up the demo session day.
You can add more items in your demo session agenda, but it should be important that you follow the same agenda and time-frames with all the vendors that participate in your product selection equally.
Gabriel Magarino
Gabriel Magariño is a Security Manager, Identity & Access Management Evangelist. He currently leads multiple deployment teams and specializes in One Identity products, and has recently expanded his repertoire to include IdentityIQ & IdentityNow by Sailpoint, Okta & One Login, CyberArk. Gabriel enjoys exploring other products like OpenIDM, OpenAM by ForgeRock, JumpCloud, and many others sharing technical knowledge on this web site. He has a Computer Science Master degree with additional certifications like ITIL, SCRUM, One Identity Architect,IdentityNow,etc.