The one with an easy self-service trial period (let's call it product A from now on) was a breeze to install, both the server and the agents, and the GUI looked very sleek and intuitive - it took me roughly an hour to get as far as looking at some analysis of slow transactions from a test server. They clearly had made an effort to polish the product and make it such that one doesn't need to be über geek to be able to install and use it. I am rather geek myself, but I still appreciate the effort.
The supplier of the other one (product B), of which I'd seen some really nice demos, had a peculiar requirement: I had to schedule for a live demo before getting the download. Had I not already made my mind that I wanted to have this product for a trial run, I might have bailed out (as the demo required much more of my time and I'd already seen much of the stuff they could demo for me). However, I made the personal sacrifice of attending to a session outside of the office hours (due to the awkward eight hour time difference). During the demo it become clear that the product actually didn't officially support the version of the monitoring software that we had and to which product B was to be integrated to, but they had a beta to which they immediately added the support and asked me if I'd like to wait for releasing it or have it immediately as a beta. Original estimate for the release was "a few weeks", but it eventually was changed to "next week". I waited, happy for such a swift response for the need.
As the promised time came, I received a download link. I grabbed the installation packages and went on with the instructions. However, I got stalled for roughly an hour in trying to get the agent installed successfully, as the only automated installation was for the case when the application server is started with a batch file and there was only some notes about setting things up when it is installed as a service. I finally figured out the parameter I needed to add to the service wrapper to get it going, and so finally got everything installed. Then I went for the GUI to get some readings on how the system is running, just as I did with product A. This time that was not a breeze, either, despite of the demo I'd seen just a week earlier. I had to look things up in the manual to navigate in the GUI and get what I wanted.
Needless to say, at this point I had rather strong preference for the product A for its ease of set up and use.
I emailed my experience with the product B (with some very honest critique, pointing also out the contrast with the product of their competitor) to the account manager I had been in contact with. I was ok with having the technical issues forwarded to their support team and after two days I received email from the product manager who asked for some clarifications, mentioned that some of the issues I noted were known and gave some workarounds, and promised to get back with the rest of the issues after they had looked into them more closely. The next day I noticed they had actually opened support cases for many of my issues as I got a more detailed status report and some more assistance.
One and a half weeks later, after catching up with some other things in the meantime, I emailed some further info and questions on some of the issues, for which I received again very prompt and helpful response. The next day - directly after installing the agent in production - I had yet another issue (due to having messed up some config while trying to work around on my own an issue with the agent installer), and next morning I had enough info to remedy the situation.
At this point my preference had changed again - despite the product B being hard to install (well, I'd already installed it on every server I needed) and having some bugs and limitations (that were now known to me) and inferior GUI and user experience overall.
Why?
I had seen that they had a support team and attitude that is not that common in the industry. I knew, that if I ever encounter an issue with their product, I'll have a solution in my inbox promptly. Besides, having a GUI with a steep learning curve is not an issue as I've got used to things that way (that's what I do here, figure out things) and I prefer a "professional" UI over an easy and simple one that can get restricting when you want something that is not a very common use case. Last but not least, the off-the-shelf license cost of the product B in our case was lower than the price of the product A even after applying all the possible discounts their sales person could come up with.
So, even if your product is polished and fancy, you might still get beaten by someone who has the right attitude (not to forget a more realistic price tag). Also, if you don't offer an easy-to-start trial period, you might also get ignored, unless you've already earlier succeeded in making a very good impression.
