So you are planning to buy a new accounts package? It's going to be a massive upheaval, so you want to get it right and, hopefully, buy something that's going to last you the next 10 years. David Carter reports.
In the first article I mentioned that in recent years many established software vendors have been bought up by money men who like the guaranteed maintenance revenue. The danger is that these new owners know very little about software: deliberately or inadvertently they may end up mismanaging the product.
So these days you have to look closely at who owns the software. Maybe it would be safer to buy from one of the really big vendors, who is so big that they can’t be taken over? Sage maybe, or SAP or Microsoft?
Resellers
One thing to get clear is that in this SME ("small and medium size enterprise”") marketplace, there are tens of thousands of customers and it is not practicable for the big vendors to deal with them all.
Join our social media discussion group and share your Twitter username with other BusinessZone members. 
We're putting together a list of business owners' must-haves. 
Dragons' Den judges James Caan and Deborah Meaden and social entrepreneur Karen Darby are some of the successful entrepreneurs who feature in our exclusive videos.