You didn't plan for 40 vendors. It happened one deal at a time — a new tool for this team, a different platform for that office, a point solution for a problem that needed fixing last quarter. Each decision made sense in isolation. None of them were made with the full picture in view.
Now you're paying for three tools that do the same thing, contracts that overlap, licenses no one uses, and a stack so fragmented that no single person in the organization can tell you what you have or what it costs.
Right now, somewhere in your organization, someone is being asked: "What are we actually spending on technology?" And nobody has a clean answer.
That's not a reporting problem. That's what vendor sprawl looks like from the inside.
The vendor-driven market doesn't reward consolidation — it rewards expansion. Every vendor has a financial incentive to grow their footprint inside your organization, not shrink it. The security vendor wants to be your security platform. The cloud vendor wants to be your everything vendor. The collaboration tool wants to replace email, then telephony, then the contact center.
The result: enterprise pricing across a dozen vendors for capabilities you could get from three. Features licensed from Vendor A being sold to you again by Vendor B. Integrations held together by duct tape nobody wants to touch — and a cost that goes way beyond the invoices.
Most companies that try to tackle vendor sprawl start with a spreadsheet. They ask each team what tools they use. They get incomplete answers. They discover shadow IT — tools purchased on corporate cards that never went through procurement. They find contracts signed by people who left two years ago.
You've probably already been through this. The spreadsheet exists. It's just not complete, not current, and doesn't tell you what anything should cost.
The problem isn't willpower. It's that consolidation requires an independent view of your entire vendor landscape — what each contract covers, where the overlap lives, what the market alternatives are, and which vendors will negotiate honestly versus which ones will sandbag. Without that view, you're not consolidating. You're guessing.
Every vendor in your stack has a team dedicated to retaining and expanding your spend with them. When you start consolidation conversations, they'll fight to survive — with discounts, with bundling, with scare tactics about switching costs. You need someone in the room who sees the whole board, not just one vendor's piece of it.
ITBroker.com provides independent representation for technology buyers. We've worked across 967 providers. We know where functionality overlaps between vendors, which consolidation paths actually work at your scale, and what companies your size should be paying. We know which vendors will negotiate honestly when you tell them you're consolidating — and which ones will sandbag.
Our commission is the same regardless of which vendor you choose. If the right move is to consolidate onto one of your existing vendors, we'll tell you. If the right move is to replace three vendors with one you've never heard of, we'll tell you that too.
Vendor sprawl didn't happen overnight and it won't get fixed overnight. But the first step is knowing what you actually have — and what it should cost.
No pitch. No prep. Just answers about your vendor landscape and where the overlap is costing you.
