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Vendor agnostic or vendor specialist – Which approach makes sense for you?

By: Chris Sator, OnX Enterprise Solutions

I’ve come across this question many times through the pleasure of dialogue with many clients, partners and vendors. It’s an interesting conundrum. Where do you turn for unbiased advice and assistance while ensuring it’s in your personal AND your company’s best interests?

After all – relationship selling is great but at the end of the day you don’t want to become blind-sided by a technological advantage or disadvantage that could help/hinder your company and ultimately your career when architecting solutions.

Let’s face it, relationship or not, no vendor has all the technology ingredients you’ll need to complete specific solutions you’re looking to build. We all know technology has cycles of innovation, evolution, integration and disruption.

So how do you ensure that you are getting the best bang for your buck? (Without creating a management nightmare?)

To ensure technology leadership, vendors fill out their portfolios through acquisition and internal development – the larger the company the more difficult it is to innovate quickly enough while acquisitions have pitfalls in consolidating toolsets, architectures and management consoles across product lines especially as IT evolves more and more to automated policy based approaches including cloud.

It takes time….the larger their portfolio the more time and energy.

Today’s solutions consist of several components – many pieces of hardware and software across applications, networks, compute, storage and IT management, so that it’s all about how you manage and maintain these environments together too – all as one entity. So it’s understandable to have vendors sell “solutions” knowing quite well that the real solution involves their piece as well as others to build, manage, maintain and integrate into an organization.

Then isn’t it up to Solution Providers to bring out the best of breed and integrated approaches?

So why is it that so many Solution Provider’s specifically focus on a limited number of vendors?

They optically partner with many vendors but when you really peel back the onion, the primary focus was with but a few. The remaining vendor lists was to give optics on being vendor neutral, although you’d quickly see through that with their skewed vendor revenues, abilities to architect and implement. Many of them believe they need to focus on specific expertise but doesn’t this mean they become just like the vendors?

What advice are they really giving you?

This is where OnX excels – but to do so one needs to have relevant revenues across a number of vendors – to the tune of being #1 in the enterprise space (not a volume desktop provider) across Canada for 5 major vendors and in the top 3 for a majority of the rest – in a few cases rising faster than others so that the #1 list will certainly be growing.

But why is that important?

It means we partner well with many, many clients to ensure they get what makes sense to them – not what’s being pushed or hyped. And we partner well with many vendors to ensure you have access to all the solution ingredients needed.

AND one needs to have the integration abilities to design, build and manage them. OnX excels here too with over 200+ engineering resources in the field assisting clients with strategies, business cases, development, implementations, migrations and operational expertise. All at cost effective rates and with flexible engagement approaches.

We manage over 2000 systems in our own data centers and remotely for clients – so we certainly do understand your issues since we face them ourselves.

Tags: onx vendor, vendor agnostic, vendor specialist