Your quoting data is a moat. Where it lives should be a question you ask.

Most evaluations of a quoting tool start with speed and accuracy questions, and get to data ownership last, if at all. That ordering makes sense for a tool that touches nothing sensitive. It doesn't make sense for one that ingests every RFQ, every customer-specific price, and every margin rule a company runs on.

Your catalog, your pricing logic, and your quote history are a real competitive asset, built over years of contract negotiations and product knowledge. A vendor that's vague about where that data goes, or whether it trains a shared model across its customer base, is asking you to hand over the asset without saying what happens to it.

It should be a plain sentence, not a page of qualifiers: your catalog, your pricing, and your quote history are yours. Encrypted in transit and at rest. Not used to train a model shared across other customers. A clear answer for what happens to your data if you stop using the product.

If a vendor can't say that plainly, that's worth noticing before the RFQ backlog, not after. Ask it in week one. A vendor with a real answer will give you a straight one.