IT Vendor Relationships Might Be Slowing Your Company’s Growth

ARE IT VENDORS LIMITING YOUR POTENTIAL?

When businesses depend on legacy IT infrastructure to support their day-to-day operations, it’s hard to envision a future without those solutions. In reality, though, this kind of short-term focus creates long-term business challenges – especially when it comes to growing your business.

Legacy infrastructure is rife with inflexible elements and other limitations that create constraints all across your IT environment. But those constraints are most noticeable – and most costly – when it comes to adding new customers and growing your business operations.

As plan out your company’s growth goals for the years ahead, your IT vendor relationship could become the single-biggest obstacle to achieving your desired results. Here are a few of the ways a costly IT vendor can stop your business from reaching its full potential.

MAINTENANCE-HEAVY IT SPENDING

As IT infrastructure ages, it becomes more expensive and resource-intensive to maintain. This is particularly true for IT business solutions from previous generations that aren’t equipped with cloud or hybrid capabilities.

To keep these solutions serviceable, companies need to dedicate a significant percentage of their budget to maintaining legacy software and hardware. These pricy support and maintenance fees go straight into the pockets of major vendors, resulting in an ever-increasing share of IT spending that is dedicated to propping up old, inferior technology – at the expense of more value-added investments.

LACK OF PLATFORM INNOVATION

REQUIRED LEGACY PLATFORM UPDATES

When vendors deliver upgrades to their IT services, they rarely cater to the needs of individual clients. Instead, vendors often force their clients to upgrade in order to justify price increases or to ensure continued access to support – even if the client doesn’t want to, or doesn’t see the business benefits of those updates.

This revenue-centric approach to upgrading IT infrastructure – known as bundling – only serves the vendor’s bottom line. While businesses may see a few fringe benefits, there is rarely a strong ROI justification for implementing the updates.

INCREASED HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE WASTE

Unused and/or underutilized solutions are a source of waste in more ways than one. Unnecessary software services and capabilities drain money away at no benefit to the client, while outdated electronic hardware is expensive to maintain, and eventually contributes to the growing e-waste crisis.

This waste could be greatly reduced by shifting IT investments to more sustainable hardware and software solutions with long-term value and growth potential. Unfortunately for businesses, these innovative, sustainable investments are rarely a good fit with their existing IT solutions.

INABILITY TO SCALE OPERATIONS

Because legacy IT solutions are fixed and inflexible, they aren’t easily scaled to support a growing customer base and increased production. So, to support your growth, your business will likely need to pour more resources into extra services from your IT vendor. Even if they can help you scale in a limited way, the balance between revenue and expenses is far from optimized. Besides that, the lack of flexibility can have a direct impact on your customer experience and profit margins.

ABOUT ORIGINA

Origina is a third-party software support and maintenance (TPSM) solution unlike any other. It’s the only TPSM solution that gives IBM® customers 24/7 access to over 600 IBM® product experts with a minimum of 15 years supporting and developing IBM® products.

Origina shifts you from relying on a single point of vendor support to having a team of legacy software experts that implement an extensive system of checks and balances to greatly limit your exposure to vulnerabilities.

We support all versions – supported or not – of over 800 IBM® products and save our customers hundreds of thousands on OEM upgrades they don’t need. Our team works hard to enhance, extend and protect your IBM® products and provide solid advice on how to best migrate business-critical systems.

We’re a team of straight shooters who love to talk software shop and fully support software customers’ freedom of choice. Get in touch if you’d like a free feasibility assessment to help you assess whether third-party support is the best option for your company.