In today’s age, IT challenges faced with a single sourced vendor approach, can lead to significant complications. Like many examples in recent history, such as the Financial Crisis, having no backup plan or limited knowledge can results in costly solutions.
Diversification in today’s unsettled market is the framework for ensuring operations during difficult times. In an environment where IT must fight for organizational dollars, it is important to work smarter, not harder by planning ahead and adding value through vendor deployment. Regardless of network services, application deployment multi-vendor strategies form the backbone for ensuring continuous operation and service evolution. As for the benefits, they speak for themselves:
• Reduce Operating Cost: Building an efficient and secure network infrastructure in a rapidly changing IT landscape is a relentless and complex task. By pursuing a “best-of-breed” approach to technology selection, your company becomes armed with a powerful weapon: Choice. No longer are you being driven by a single vendor, you are able to negotiate with market-leaders who are aimed at solving specific business needs and technical problems. It is not all about creating pricing wars, but savings is created from vendors service, and supporting obligations to deliver operational efficiencies. Historically, according to Gartner, lower total cost of ownership (TCO) for organizations with multi-vendor networks is common because of the ability to shop around for lower prices. In turn, this reduces a lack of control on costs due to a virtual monopoly being enjoyed by your sole vendor partner.
• Performance Metrics: Keep the bar high in a competitive environment, it pays to keep a level of performance among your vendors. A multi-vendor approach gives you the power to identify poor performers and eliminate them without risking system integrity or restarting lengthy and complex projects from the beginning. Performance metrics show both the vendor and yourself exactly where they stack up, and where they need to improve.
• Contingency Planning and Recovery: A survey of 400 IT executives by IDG Research revealed that 40% rate their organizations’ ability to recover their operations in the event of disaster or disruption as “fair or poor”. Three out of four companies fail from a disaster recovery standpoint, according to the Disaster Recovery Preparedness Benchmark. A multi-vendor approach enables organizations to react to downtime or poor service quality in a way which provides continuous operations. A smart, detailed approach to vendor selection (data center footprint, redundancy objectives, support approaches) can ensure that downtime is eliminated. Multi-vendor approaches enables organizations to look at both functionality and features as well as vendor stability to find a blend which reaps the maximum benefits.
• Innovation: Today’s high-performance business landscape requires technology decisions to be coupled with business requirements. Having a single-source vendor presents a false security of having a single trusted advisor. The trusted advisor will lull businesses to believe they are automating a manageable and self-defending network. In reality, a single-vendor trusted advisor limits businesses from the ability to negotiate, achieve the best pricing and full range of functionality available. Innovation occurs at the vendor’s pace, and not with what is best for your business.
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