It’s one of those things that seem hard to avoid. One vendor can’t meet all your needs, so another one must be brought into the picture to pick up the slack. It would be great if one vendor could do everything, but that’s rarely the case.
Organizations can find themselves using several IT vendors for a number of reasons. They are sometimes inherited through acquisitions. The situation can result from the inability to control the IT activities of several business units, or maybe there was no other way to address the different IT needs throughout the company. What businesses must ask themselves is what their magic number is. How many vendors is enough?
The Disadvantages of Multiple IT Vendors
Too many IT vendors can affect the bottom line of your business. Each vendor relationship requires someone’s attention to manage. It may sound easy, but dealing with a vendor isn’t always as straightforward as it seems. It also isn’t cheap. Every relationship a company has with a vendor they use comes with a cost.
Besides taking time away from IT employees, other staff within the company are involved with these vendors, too. Each deal must be negotiated for the best rate, the legal department must look over the contracts, procurement gets involved, and accounting has to look after the invoices and billing. If a company has ten IT vendors, which isn’t uncommon, this process would have to be repeated ten times—all at a cost.
Support and Management Become Difficult
When too many IT vendors are used, support can take much longer than what it needs to. Multiple vendors equal multiple support phone numbers and so on. There are all the calls made to various help desks, frustration that comes with explaining a problem multiple times over, as well as the complexity of describing your environment and its unique configurations. Instead of having IT staff working on innovative projects, they have to focus on these run-of-the-mill tasks that ensure the business runs as usual.
Management also becomes tricky with too many vendors. Each vendor has a contract that comes with its own start and end date. When you have too many to keep track of, contracts can lapse because renewal dates will blur. If a company forgets to renew a contract, they can experience operational problems months later. In turn, this would unnecessarily increase the total cost of support because these problems are now more expensive to repair.
A well-managed IT environment is a secure one. Studies have shown that businesses can have up to 70 different security vendors installed or present in the company to solve problems. Seventy vendors is a lot to manage. If an IT environment is mismanaged, security won’t be as strong or effective; these elements go hand-in-hand.
Related: 4 Large Business Security Risks Companies Need to be Aware of
To answer the primary question, too many IT vendors cause headaches for businesses. They are hard to manage, time-consuming to deal with, and costly to use. Having too many can also be a sign of a bigger management problem. Companies need to reduce the number of IT vendors they work with to three or four who can effectively meet their needs. Talk to ACSI, a trusted value added partner, about how we can help with managing or reducing a multi-vendor environment.
