Consumer Advice for a Business

Jambo

Company I work for Purchased IT Services involving a somewhat bespoke system from another EU country - however once the install was complete it was quickly noted that the database/system was far off coming up to par with the agreed spec and the services being supplied leave a lot to question - to such a degree its mostly not a workable system.

Hence can someone point me to the relavent consumer law / consumer center that would deal with Business Consumer Advise - specifically relating to software / IT services ( I seem to recall reading somewhere before that IT Services / non off the shelf software fall into a completely different bracket than normal consumer law)

Sorry folk I am probably been a bit vague here but need to be so for so many various reasons.

L1011

Consumer protections inherently do not apply to business to business transactions. You need to look for a lawyer to enforce the terms of the contract here.

28064212

Short answer: You need professional advice. The B2B area is hugely different to B2C. This is not something you go to an internet forum for

Jambo

Thanks for the replies was just hoping there may be some reading out there to help steer the conversation with the supplier before legal is brought into the picture.

dudara

Moving to Entreprenurial & Business Management, as this has nothing to do with Consumer Issues. B2B transactions are not subject to Consumer law.

ironclaw

A lot of what I do in my day to day is performance and optimization for business systems, generally quite large and enterprise level. Nearly every contract I've seen states the minimum response times, error rates etc that are acceptable for the final product. I'd suggest a breeze through the terms / User Acceptance that the system was delivered under. The slowest systems I've come across are either:

- Poor designed to start with, so you're looking at significant coding changes to get them to spec or operating at a reasonable level.
- Under spec'd hardware, could be as simple as slightly increasing the hardware that the server its running on.
- Trivial and missed coding parameter, this is especially common in database scenarios where a bad query, index or table schema is slowing things down.

All said though, you'd want to compare what you accepted and paid for, and ensure its being upheld. On the flip side however, ensure that the request and your own practices are reasonable e.g. Asking for the average price of 2 million database rows every minute in less than 10ms is not realistic.