It's not difficult to get sidetracked when selecting technology solutions to solve your data management problems. You want to make sure you do your due diligence and understand all the potential options for solving your IT challenge and would not want to accidently leave out the best solution in your investigation. This can easily create an opportunity for the manufacturers to talk about all the cool stuff their companies have been recently developing, whether or not it has anything to do with your current project. Perhaps they can even uncover another sales opportunity even though they may have been removed from the details of your environment for over a year.
This is the perfect time to engage your local VAR who has probably been at your facility supporting you 10 times over the past year, or probably even occupied a guest cube at times. They have likely had their hands in the mix at your site and deployed similar technology at other clients. They will likely know the caveats to successful interoperability with your infrastructure. At this point you have probably reviewed a ton of marketing material and made some directional choices, now it's time to talk to the folks in the field, review and admin guide or two and flip through some release notes.