Whether you're a local authority running a formal tender, a fleet electrifying a depot, or a business choosing a partner for destination charging, the platform decision will outlast the hardware decision. Chargers get replaced; the system that operates them — and holds your data, your driver relationships and your reporting history — tends to stay.
These are the twelve questions we believe every buyer should ask, including of us. For each: why it matters, and what a good answer sounds like.
Interoperability and lock-in
1. Which OCPP versions and hardware brands do you support in production — today, not on the roadmap? Mixed fleets are the norm. Listen for named versions (1.6 through 2.1) and real deployed hardware, not "OCPP compliant" in the abstract.
2. If we leave, how do our chargers and our data come with us? OCPP is an open standard, so chargers can be repointed to another backend. A confident vendor explains the exit process plainly — configuration handover, full data export, session history. Evasion here predicts your renewal negotiations.
3. Can our own systems access everything through an API? Billing, CRM, asset registers, FOI reporting — sooner or later the data needs to flow. The strong answer is a published, documented API covering everything the dashboard does, with webhooks or streaming for real-time events. "We can build an export" is a weak answer priced by the hour.
Reliability and evidence
4. How do you measure charger uptime, and can we see it calculated for a live network? UK public charging regulations set a 99% reliability requirement for rapid networks; funders and the public will hold you to numbers. What matters is how uptime is measured — connector-level, outcome-based, with the method stated. Our engineering team wrote up why "online" and "working" are different questions; a vendor should be able to have that conversation fluently.
5. What's your own platform's availability record — and is it published? A platform outage takes your whole network dark, whatever the chargers are doing. Ask for a status page and historical evidence, not an SLA table in a sales deck. (Ours: status.ampnexus.net and a public performance page with continuously collected load-test results.)
6. How do firmware updates reach our chargers, and what happens when one goes wrong? Firmware is a leading cause of self-inflicted downtime. Listen for staged rollouts, per-device status, approval gates and automatic rollback — and ask to see the audit trail from a real rollout.
Security and compliance
7. What security certifications do you hold, and which are in progress? Certifications are floor, not ceiling — but they demonstrate the discipline exists. Ask about Cyber Essentials, ISO 27001 status, and how the platform enforces access control internally. (Our answers are on the security page.)
8. Where is our data hosted, and under what data-protection arrangements? For UK public bodies this is often a pass/fail requirement. The answer should name jurisdictions and the contractual basis, without hedging.
9. How is access controlled inside our organisation? Role-based access with audit trails means your support team can restart a charger but not change tariffs, and every action has a name attached. If everyone shares one admin login, keep shopping.
Commercial and operational fit
10. What does white-labelling actually cover? If the network carries your brand, how deep does that go — driver app, receipts, portals, domains? "Your logo in the corner" and a genuinely white-label platform are different products at similar prices.
11. How do you support multiple sites, operators or sub-brands under one contract? Councils with district partners, fleets with multiple depots, operators with franchisees — this is multi-tenancy, and it's architectural. Retrofitted multi-tenancy shows up later as billing confusion and permissions chaos.
12. Show us the last twelve months of product changes. The single fastest credibility test. An active platform has a public, dated release history; a stagnant one has a roadmap slide. We keep ours at /changelog, generated directly from our delivery pipeline — every entry with its test results attached.
Using these in a formal tender
Three practical tips from the receiving end of procurement exercises:
- Ask for evidence, not essays. "Provide your public status page URL and 12 months of release notes" gets you facts; "describe your approach to reliability" gets you adjectives.
- Weight the exit question. Switching costs are where platform relationships go wrong; a clean exit answer de-risks the whole award.
- Have a technical evaluator in the room for the demo. Ask the vendor to perform a remote restart, show a real rollout audit trail, and pull a session record over the API — live, not in slides.
We're happy to answer all twelve for AmpNexus, in writing, with evidence attached — get in touch.