Why a Single IT Partner Beats Six Separate Suppliers

The phones are down. You call the telephony provider, who checks their systems and tells you the fault is with the internet connection. You call the internet provider, who confirms the line is up and suggests it must be your network equipment. You call whoever supplied the firewall. Two hours have passed and nobody has taken responsibility for anything.

Every business with several IT suppliers knows this afternoon. It is the strongest argument for a single IT partner, and it has nothing to do with technology.

How companies end up with six suppliers

Nobody plans this. It accumulates, one sensible decision at a time.

The web agency who built the site also registered the domain. The accountant recommended someone for the bookkeeping software. A telephony company called during a quiet week and the offer was decent. The internet came with the building. Someone’s brother-in-law set up the server. Each choice made sense on its own.

Five years later, nobody has the whole picture. Not you, and not any of them.

What fragmentation actually costs

Time, mostly yours. Vendor management is unpaid project work, and it lands on whoever is least able to refuse it. Usually an owner or an office manager with a different job to do.

Nobody owns the gaps. Every supplier is responsible for their own box. The connections between the boxes belong to no one, and that is precisely where faults live.

Diagnosis takes longer. A single IT partner sees the network, the firewall, the cloud environment and the phones at once. Three separate suppliers each see a third of the picture and reason from there.

Security falls between the cracks. Your telephony provider does not check your backups. Your web agency does not manage your laptops. Ask each of them who is responsible for security and they will each name a genuine part of it, and between those parts sit the gaps.

You pay twice. Overlapping subscriptions, two tools doing the same job, licences nobody cancelled. Fragmented purchasing is expensive purchasing.

What changes with a single IT partner

The obvious thing is that you get one point of contact. The more useful things are less obvious.

Someone holds the full map. When you ask whether you can open a second location, or whether a new application will work, the answer comes from a view of the whole environment rather than a guess about someone else’s part.

Faults get owned rather than diagnosed by committee. If the phones are down, the question of whether it is the line, the firewall or the configuration is an internal one, resolved without you in the middle.

Purchasing gets tidier. A single IT partner who knows what you already own is in a position to notice that you are paying for the same capability twice.

And planning becomes possible. Fragmented IT can only ever be reactive, because nobody has the standing to say what should happen next year.

The reasonable objections

Two worries come up, and both deserve a straight answer.

“Isn’t that risky, putting everything with one company?” It would be, if it meant handing over ownership. It should not. Your domains, licences and accounts stay in your name, and you keep documentation you can take elsewhere. Consolidating who manages things is not the same as consolidating who owns them, and any partner worth having will insist on that distinction themselves.

“Can one company really be good at all of it?” Fair question. Nobody builds everything in-house, and you should expect a single IT partner to work with specialists for particular products. The difference is that they coordinate those specialists instead of you doing it. Ask directly which things they handle themselves and where they bring others in. An honest answer is a good sign.

How to approach IT consolidation without upheaval

You do not have to change everything at once, and it is usually better not to. Start with the areas causing the most friction, or simply move each contract as it comes up for renewal. Within a year or two most of it has moved without a single disruptive project.

Begin by writing down what you have: every supplier, what they deliver, what it costs and when the contract ends. That list on its own tends to be clarifying, because almost nobody has ever seen it in one place.

Let us be the number you call

At EvolvingDesk we cover workplace, cloud, network, telephony and business software, which means the boundaries between them are our problem rather than yours. Your phones, your Microsoft environment and your internet connection all sit with people who can see how they fit together.

Practically, that means one contact, one bill and one party who cannot pass the blame anywhere. It also means everything stays in your name and documented, so choosing a single IT partner never becomes a dependency you cannot leave.

You stop being the switchboard between your own suppliers. That is what Making IT Effortless means in practice.

Tired of playing referee? Plan a call and bring the list of who you currently pay for what.

Read more

• Managed IT services at EvolvingDesk
• What is VoIP, and why are businesses ditching landlines
• What is a managed service provider

Further reading: the NCSC guidance on supply chain security and the Wikipedia overview of managed services.