I have a customer that has an internal system that we want to replace.<p>We dont want to tell the current vendor we will replace their system with a new one. But I want to ask them for a complete SQL Dump.<p>I need some advice on asking that information in a polite way.
You don't. The customer asks for a full copy of their data. And then passes it on to you. And then you accept whatever format you get it in and write a script to migrate it to your system.<p>If you anticipate winning more customers from this vendor, you write that script to be re-usable in the future. And you write another one each time you displace a competitive vendor.<p>Eventually, you have a library of scripts and can start marketing how smoothly and quickly you can migrate new customers off those vendors.