A customer opens a conversation by naming the specific offering it intends to buy, before describing any requirement. What is the appropriate response?

• A. Understand what led them to that choice, then test it against what they need.
• B. Proceed with the named offering, since the customer has already made its decision.
• C. Set the named offering aside and conduct discovery as though it had not been mentioned.
• D. Present alternatives to the named offering so the customer can compare before deciding.

A customer's month-end financial consolidation runs for two days and needs no resources for the rest of the month. It runs on an application from one of the alliance partners, and the architect intends to position capacity that is taken up for the consolidation and released afterwards. What must be confirmed about the partner's application before this is proposed?

• A. Whether the consolidation results could be produced by a simpler tool the customer already owns.
• B. Whether its licensing and support terms allow it to run on capacity taken up and released each month.
• C. Whether a newer release of the application exists than the one the customer runs today.
• D. Whether the finance team could spread the consolidation across the month, so that no capacity needs releasing.

A proposal may either grow an installed solution or expand the customer into other solutions. What distinguishes growing from expanding?

• A. Growing applies to the edge sites, while expanding applies to the central data centre that serves them all.
• B. Growing scales what is already deployed, while expanding introduces capability the customer does not yet have.
• C. Growing is something the customer normally asks for, while expanding is something the architect proposes to them.
• D. Growing affects only capacity, while expanding affects only the consumption model.

A customer's demand for a workload varies unpredictably month to month, and its finance team dislikes committing capital to capacity that may sit unused. Which characteristic of an offering most directly answers this?

• A. Capacity is consumed and paid for as it is used.
• B. Capacity is purchased in advance at a discounted rate for the whole term.
• C. Capacity is adjusted at each annual renewal.
• D. Capacity is fixed at the highest level the workload has reached, rather than following what it uses.

A customer moving to a private cloud asks what its own IT function will still be responsible for once teams can serve themselves. What should the architect tell them?

• A. The environment itself - its capacity, its policies and its continued operation.
• B. Approving the requests that teams submit through the self-service mechanism.
• C. Nothing further, once the environment has been commissioned and handed over.
• D. Only the hardware itself, on the basis that the software side now looks after itself.