Customer-Vendor relationships
Yesterday I blogged about an unhealthy relationship our company has with a service provider. Overnight that relationship took a turn for the worse.
They are now proposing that we place static routes on our hosts that reside in their network. These static routes point all traffic from subnet X to subnet Y. One problem with this is that we use subnet X in another office. The other problem is that subnet Y is the subnet on their DMZ and even more disturbing, all of their hosts on the LAN have IP’s in subnet Y. That’s right, their DMZ and LAN are the same subnet.
Now how the hell did that happen? Glad you asked. It happened because, as I said yesterday, the customer is always right and when the customer allows a relationship to get out of hand and the customer allows the vendor to dictate what happens on the customer’s network, that becomes the “right” relationship.
The customer defines the relationship because the customer is the livlihood of the vendor. The vendor exists solely to provide a service or deliverable in return for the mean-green, based on the terms agreed upon in the contract.
So…to answer my own question from yesterday; ‘what can a customer do with a vendor relationship gone awry?’ The customer has to have a come-to-Jesus talk with the vendor remind them the boundries of the contract and the requirements the customer has for the vendor.
If that never happens, the relationship is destined for trouble and it’s the customer’s fault.
