IT vendor consolidation is the new mantra in IT efficiency. All of Fortune 100 companies have either completed vendor consolidation or are in the process of completing it.
IT vendor consolidation is expected to provide the following:
* Reduced costs
* Improved Efficiency
* Effective service delivery, and
* Streamlining of relationship management
Some of the consolidations that can be considered are as below:
Help Desk Consolidation: Depending on the maturity, select the help desk vendor in your area. Unicenter from CA, BMC software are a couple of famous help desk consolidation softwares available in the market.
Hardware Consolidation: For network Cisco and for server IBM is the buzz word in the industry.
IT Services Consolidation: Select any mature IT company, which is having efficiency in your domain. Indian IT companies can easily provide Banking, Financial, Health care, Retail IT services. But if you are looking for specialized fields like mobile computing, social network, mobile commerce, then it would be difficult to get a handful of vendors.
Some of the things that you may have to consider before going in for consolidation:
* We would lose flexibility.
* Vendors would not work well together.
* Vendor lock in will reduce quality, and
* Loss of pricing and bidding.
Whenever you are considering vendor consolidation, think about the business benefits you will be achieving through this. At the end of the day, the parameter on the scale of success is "How well you are serving your customer".
