Not too rarely is the selection of a new technology a central subject of an IT strategy. The process is not particularly complicated.
But on closer inspection, the plan turns out to be extremely time consuming. Which goals should be reached with the selection of the new technology? And how does one want to measure the success of the activity? What is the technological scope? Is a business case or ROI to be calculated at the end of the selection? The more precise a company describes the target architecture, the easier it is to make the right choice.

The search for suitable tools very often begins with the gartner magic quadrants. It is a good idea to generate the long-list or short-list from it, however, it makes little sense to base the foundation of your final decision on it. The tool must fulfill all your requirements, it doesn't really matter where the tool is positioned in the magic quadrant.

Besides some details of the implementation are vital. Moreover the following questions count: Can a company exactly describe its test cases? Is a test installation or test implementation planned by the customer?

It is our experience that some manufacturers need days for the product installation, while others were ready to test within a few hours! The more an enterprise can look over the shoulder of the vendor, the better. Have you then prepared test cases for the following areas?

• Services, content based routing
• Registry
• Messaging
• Transformation
• Adapters
• Logging
• Monitoring
• Error-Handling
• Security
• Performance

We have often found out that even the test logging was not consistent. How does one want to later objectively judge which manufacturer was better or worse. Document the whole procedure very precisely, since even after the selection, the manufacturers forget their promises! Do not forget to also check the references.