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How Effectively Consolidating IT Services Vendors Impact the Business
When most IT leaders talk about vendor sprawl, they are typically referring to their applications—particularly in their cybersecurity programs. But an often-overlooked business challenge is the impact of vendor sprawl on the IT services needs of an organization. Whether it’s maintenance, asset disposition, field services, or IT projects—especially for global, multi-location companies—there are almost always “too many cooks in the kitchen.” That’s why top companies have started consolidating IT services vendors to improve efficiency in the data center and beyond.
Managing multiple service contracts creates stress for teams, especially when there is turnover among the people in charge of these vendor relationships. It’s common to find assets covered under maintenance contracts from multiple providers, for example, wasting valuable budget. It’s also common to find that assets you thought were under maintenance were actually on contracts that have expired, and therefore require more expensive T&M support to replace or repair.
On the contrary, consolidating vendor contracts enables efficiency for the contract managers at your organization and creates substantial opportunity to add value by viewing your assets against your overall IT goals through a single pane of glass. For example, when you decommission equipment, instead of bidding those components out to several ITAD vendors, you could instead use them as spares for the machines you have under third-party maintenance. This is not a feasible solution when your TPM and ITAD vendors are separate.
To Start, Consolidate Your OEM Maintenance Agreements with a TPM Provider
If your assets are two years old or older, you should strongly consider supporting them on a third-party maintenance contract to save money and improve service delivery over what the OEM provides. But don’t rely on a TPM provider who is too highly specialized to adequately support most, if not all, of the OEMs in your environment. Find a vendor that can support servers, storage, and networking hardware on one, co-termed agreement. Ideally, find a vendor who can do this across all your locations, anywhere in the world. This will save you considerably on the cost of parts sparing, which makes up the bulk of your costs.
Then, Hire the Same Vendor to Manage Your ITAD Programs
Another surefire way to save on your parts sparing costs is to use machines you have slated for decommissioning to harvest spare components for the equipment you want under maintenance. The best way to achieve this is to hire a vendor who provides both TPM and ITAD services, ideally across all your global locations. By prioritizing reuse where applicable, you’re putting yourself in a position to save money and help the environment, as reuse should always be the option considered before recycling or disposal.
Finally, Save Even More by Leveraging Cross-Solution Bundling Pricing on Field Services
When you consolidate your IT services contracts with a single vendor worldwide, you establish opportunity to bundle pricing and save on additional offerings. For example, CentricsIT offers special pricing on its On-Demand Field Services contracts to existing third-party maintenance customers. Find out what other services you can utilize from your consolidated pool of vendors to take advantage of additional savings.
If you have any questions around the process for consolidating your IT services contracts, please reach out to the team at CentricsIT.
