"Usually, I like to have them in for three hours each and you only go to a short list. My view is you pick the four major technology vendors you want to deal with."

Clearly, you don't want to go to 30 suppliers as this simply eats up time and makes the process all the more complex.

"Then you say, here is the deal, we want X terabytes -- do you want to bid directly or do you want to go through a partner? If they want to go through a partner, that is fine, but they should put up the partner."

If the organisation is happy with the suggested partner then that is great. But it is better to have one vender and one partner, not more.

"What I want them to show me at the end is they have understood my requirements and that they propose a solution that will fit my requirements," McIsaac explained. "And when they have done all those things, I then want to look at which solution best meets my requirements. I need to be very careful to understand whether my requirements are cost or something else. That something else might be recoverability, it might be ease of management. But I need to understand what I am going to measure them on.