Diversification has its benefits but when things go wrong, vendors often say “not my problem”
For businesses, the idea of not having all your eggs in one basket can be a good practice in theory. It has benefits such as avoiding vendor lock-in, whereby an organization is forced to continue using a product or service because switching to another vendor is not practical or without substantial switching costs.
However, this diversification, driven partly by the rise in point solutions, has led to a plethora of options for enterprises when it comes to choosing vendors for their specific IT needs. Studies show that the average small business with 500 or fewer employees has 172 software applications, while mid-market companies between 501 and 2,500 employees have 255 apps on average. For large enterprises this figure more than doubles to an average of 664 apps.
In turn, this has created a fragmented landscape across the UK’s IT sector, with organizations employing the services of multiple vendors at once, something which ultimately could be holding businesses back.Many vendors but no accountability
This fragmented landscape has led to organizations calling upon a range of different vendors for each different need they have – whether that’s cloud storage, back-ups, data centers, virtual desktops, cybersecurity, you name it. Sometimes enterprises will even have multiple vendors for the same solution, such as having their data stored with multiple providers or employing a range of different back-up solution providers.
While this does stop businesses being reliant on one vendor for potentially critical solutions, it means when things go wrong there is typically no accountability, which is one of the biggest challenges enterprises and their IT teams face.
Vendors will often point the finger at each other and say “not our problem”, and sometimes they won’t even provide access to troubleshoot the issue.
