Come on, admit it... we all do it... especially technologists! We find a bright, shiny new piece of technology and then...

Vendor Proliferation

Does your organization suffer from excessive vendor proliferation? (Sounds like a bad infomercial so far!). Left ungoverned, the application portfolio for many organizations, even relatively small ones, can easily grow to be unmanageable, especially if the number of vendors is allowed to grow with the portfolio.

An interesting survey published by Accenture a while back indicates that over 57% of officers and directors fail to understand portfolio currency / health… or understand the implication of deferred application maintenance.

So why should we care? One axiom asserts that the number of “headaches” increases with the square of the number of vendors involved, so increasing an organization’s vendor count by two increases its headaches by a factor of four, a four-fold increases complexity by a factor of 16, and so on. How many vendors does your organization have?

Consider that for each vendor there typically are:

- Functionality investigation and identification
- Potential integration issues with underlying infrastructure and other applications
- Contract negotiations and renewals
- Vendor maintenance and support organizations to navigate
- Periodic upgrades and compatibility testing

One school of thought is that by minimizing the number of vendors and focusing on their integrated products, many integration, upgrade, compatibility and functionality overlap issues disappear (well, actually responsibility for these within a product suite falls on the vendor’s shoulders rather than yours).

Does your organization have a handle on its application portfolio and vendors? Would your life or the life of your IT and Procurement organizations be simplified by reducing the number of vendors? Food for thought…