Software Defined Corporation

The whole idea in one question

Did you get what you paid for? That is the entire idea. Everything else on this site is just the careful way of answering it.

When your company buys something — internet service, software, a support contract, a piece of hardware — the seller made promises. They are written down: in the contract, on the spec sheet, in the sales presentation. MFid is a score that says how well those written promises match what you actually got. A perfect score of 1.00 means every promise was kept. The further the score falls below 1.00, the bigger the gap between what was sold and what was delivered.

Think of it like a health inspection grade for the things your company buys. A restaurant does not get to grade its own kitchen; an inspector checks what is actually happening against the rules and posts a grade in the window. We do the same thing, except the “rules” are the seller’s own promises.

How the score is built — no formulas required

The process has three steps, and none of them require math to understand:

• 1. Collect the promises. We go through the contract, the spec sheets, and the sales material and write down every measurable promise. Not what the salesperson implied — what is actually in writing.
• 2. Measure what really happened. Not what the vendor’s own dashboard says, and not what anyone remembers — what independent measurement shows actually happened, over a real period of time.
• 3. Compare, promise by promise. Each promise gets its own comparison: what was promised versus what was delivered. Then the comparisons are combined into one score.

One rule governs how the comparisons combine: the weakest promise dominates. A vendor cannot hide one badly broken promise behind ten kept ones. Like a chain, the score is only as strong as the weakest link — because in real life, the promise that breaks is the one that hurts you, no matter how many others held.

The four questions we ask of every promise

Every audit asks the same four questions. On the technical pages these are called dimensions and each has a rubric; here is what they mean in ordinary language:

• Dependability — does it work every time, or just on average? A delivery service that averages “on time” but is an hour late every Friday is not dependable, even though its average looks fine. We score whether you can count on any single day, not just the average of all of them.
• Efficiency — does it cost what they said it would cost? Not whether it is cheap — whether the price you were quoted is the price you are actually paying, once the overages, add-ons, and surprises are counted.
• Observability — can anyone actually check? A promise nobody can measure is worth nothing, and we score it that way. If the vendor makes it hard to verify their own claims, that lowers the score by itself. Trust that cannot be checked is not trust.
• Integrity — does it do only what it says on the label? Whether the thing you bought behaves the way its own documentation says it behaves — no undocumented surprises, no quiet changes, no features that work differently than described.

All four are scored from the same evidence, and the weakest-link rule applies across them too: excellent pricing does not buy forgiveness for undependable service.

What the number means when you see one

• Close to 1.00 — the promises are being kept. What you were sold is what you are getting.
• Noticeably below 1.00 — there is a measurable gap somewhere, and the report names exactly which promise it is and how big the gap is. The score never arrives alone; it always comes with the list of broken promises behind it.
• Never above 1.00 — and this matters. A vendor that over-delivers (it happens — Porsche famously ships more horsepower than the brochure claims) still scores at most a perfect 1.00. The score measures whether promises match reality, not whether the vendor was generous. Generosity gets a note in the report, not extra credit on the scale.

One score, one meaning, no grade inflation. A 0.91 from us means the same thing for a phone system as it does for a cloud contract: the promises held about 91 percent of the way, and the report says exactly where they did not.

What an audit looks like from your side

• You bring the paperwork. The contract, the spec sheet, the proposal — whatever the seller put in writing. That is the whole entry requirement.
• We ask ten questions. They are published openly on the intake page: which promises matter most to you, what a failure costs you, what you can already measure. You rank the promises; you know your business, we do not.
• We measure. Over a real window of time, against the promises as written.
• You get the score and the list. The number, and behind it, every promise with its own pass-or-gap verdict. You can take that list into a renewal negotiation, an incident review, or a purchasing decision.

And we hold ourselves to the same standard: our own promises about this website are measured and published live, scored with the same instrument we point at everyone else.

If you want the math after all

Everything on this page has a precise technical counterpart, and none of it is hidden:

• Theory — the full framework and its limits.
• Methodology — the exact scoring rules, formulas, and evidence standards.
• Walkthrough — a complete worked example scoring a real public service, every step shown.

You do not need any of it to commission an audit or to read the result. The math exists so the score cannot be argued with — not so it cannot be understood.