2012年6月8日星期五

How Many IT Vendors Are Too Many-




• Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO)

• Streamlined vendor relationship management

• Reduced number of support contracts to negotiate and manage

• Increased procurement process leverage

• Reduced training, certification, and administration expenses

On the other hand, ten or more vendors seem to be a costly luxury, suggesting a lack of management or IT discipline. If you can narrow it down to three or four vendors, you’re probably in good shape. ###

Organizations end up with many IT vendors for a number of understandable reasons. Sometimes they inherit vendors through an acquisition. Corporate policies might prohibit single-source acquisitions. It may result from a failure to standardize IT or an inability to rein in the IT activities of different business units. Maybe the company found no other way to address widely different legitimate IT needs.

Given that there is a cost associated with each IT vendor, the question arises nbajerseys's Blog, How many IT vendors are enough? One, three, a dozen discontinued oakley sunglasses, more? Many organizations have ten or more. Even those that claim to have standardized on a single vendor invariably have other vendors’ products, too.

Having many IT vendors takes a toll on the bottom line. Each relationship requires somebody’s time to manage, each deal must be negotiated, legal has to review contracts, procurement has to get involved, and each relationship generates separate invoicing and billing. All of this creates cost. In addition, the organization loses out on volume discounts and other goodies if it just consolidates its IT spending with fewer vendors.







If the organization reduces the number of vendors, it stands to gain some significant benefits, according to independent IT analyst Mike Karp

To get the most from your IT investment discontinued oakley sunglasses, you have to establish and manage a relationship with each IT vendor. This isn’t as easy or straightforward as it sounds. And it certainly isn’t cheap. There is a relationship cost associated with every IT vendor you use.

Forrester Research goes so far as to suggest companies establish a vendor management office (VMO), which seems a little extreme. Forrester believes a VMO brings more maturity and process discipline to IT, allowing IT to take an activist approach to IT sourcing. Fair enough, but, to me the VMO is overkill, suggesting the project management office (PMO), infamous for its suffocating bureaucracy and project police.

So how many IT vendors should an organization have? One seems unrealistic. Even the big IT platform vendors — IBM, HP nbajerseys's Blog, Cisco, Sun (soon to be Oracle) — can’t really do it all discontinued oakley sunglasses, although they can come close. But even they have to rely on an ecosystem of ISVs and partners to fill various gaps.

You can check out the full details in a white paper I wrote for HP based on Karp’s research into vendor consolidation. In short, vendor consolidation allows the organization to focus its effort and attention on a fewer number of vendors and products, ultimately resulting in CapEx and OpEx advantages.

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