One Vendor – or Two, or Three or…

One Vendor – or Two, or Three or….

In today’s market place, we typically run into two philosophies. Its either a one throat to choke philosophy that seeks advantage through leverage of one point of contact and negotiation, or it’s a choose two and play them off against each other philosophy. Sometimes we find the operationally focused organization with a multi vendor approach driven by the illusion that happiness in IT comes from highly configured fit for purpose solutions.  Even though end user needs are rarely known empirically.

Personally, I think the key here is to ensure the reference architecture does not contain any defacto or hidden lock-in. Some examples of how lock-in can occur include appliance solutions (like backup and dedup), virtualization that is not frame based, and encryption enforced over all disk based storage.

If there are no impediments to data migration, then moving to another vendor is not only doable but should actually be a defined process that is tested once a year (like disaster recovery) just to make sure no vendor has secretly captured the storage jewels.

I’d recommend closely constraining the number of suppliers as part of an official policy to minimize the technologies that need investment and training in administrative support. That’s where the real expense lies. People costs go up and up, hardware costs go down and down.

Administrative workload (cost) is calculated by the number of technologies that need managing times the number of activities occurring in provisioning and alerts, times the complexity of the environment.

The ability to minimize administrative support should always trump lower hardware prices. It should also trump the illusion of business satisfaction that comes from allegedly fit for purpose solutions where each tier has a highly engineered unique technology, albeit to meet a “business need that is more often presumed than defined with specific attributes. The strategic view has to place inordinate emphasis on automated monitoring, provisioning and management. As we progress and listen to the many stakeholders involved and try to capture their interests and needs in empirical terms, its critical to think carefully and objectively to identify the real problem that we are trying to solve, and then to make sure, through due diligence, that the solution does not cause unintended consequences – like vendor lock-in. Saving pennies in hardware can costs multiple dollars in on going administrative expense.

By Dick Benton, GlassHouse Principal Consultant

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