Buying services and software can sometimes feel like the Wild West to enterprise clients, used to easier choices between a few proprietary vendors with off the shelf products, and now facing a plethora of open source choices too.

But it's now becoming widely known that good open source vendors can deliver much higher value through providing solutions more closely tailored to the real needs of the client, with the client paying for features they need, rather than simply for annual license fees.

So, in a world where anyone can call themselves a Drupal agency, how do clients get the Good vendors, and avoid the Bad and the Ugly?

In this presentation I'll walk through a number of real world procurement scenarios, and discuss the different approaches - and outcomes. From these lessons I'll set out recommendations for successfully procuring open source services to set your project up for well from the start.