Fatigue. It’s a good word, isn’t it? It’s one of those words where you can almost feel yourself succumbing to the emotion it describes even as you say it. “Fatigué,” as the French say. I don’t know about you but I feel so tired that I could almost go for a lie down after writing that.
Not that I’m going to. And I’d urge you not to either.
My thoughts have turned to the topic of fatigue because of a story that appeared on the IT Europa website, originally published at the end of last month, concerning just that subject.
Or at least an interesting channel variant thereof: vendor fatigue.
Reporting on a panel discussion at the Channel Sec event, IT Europa stated that vendor fatigue had “become a prevalent issue among MSPs that ultimately will lead to a period of rationalisation”.
Now before you start taking umbrage at what seems to be a display of spectacular rudeness by MSPs, I think it’s important to stress it’s nothing personal. MSPs aren’t greeting vendor visitors with a weary sigh and an eye roll. Or if they are, they’re making sure it isn’t seen.
To switch to French for a little bit here, we’re not talking about vendor ennui.
What the panellists were getting at was something different, the fatigue that sets in from having to deal with so many vendors. Sadly, having so many vendors involved in your business is not always necessarily a sign of popularity.
Greg Jones, EMEA VP of Business Development at Kaseya, told the audience: “There’s a huge number of vendors out there, and this is one of the top challenges for MSPs…I recall dealing with around 22 different vendors to enable our total solution span. It can be very, very hard, with different account managers, bills, and headaches.”
The flip side of this is, as some would argue, increased competition and more innovation. Which is probably true, up to a point. But when the differences between products and services can be only slight, innovation and competition aren’t exactly compelling.
This brings us to the near-eternal struggle between a one-size-fits-all approach where customers try to get as much of their products and services from a very small number of vendors and a best-in-breed approach which tries to pick the “best” provider in each category.
Clearly, there’s a lot more interactions and administration when you’re dealing with several vendors instead of just a small number.
Ironically, one of the reasons MSPs may find themselves overwhelmed by vendor fatigue is because they have been co-opted to – or volunteered for – the role of finding, integrating and packaging several chosen products and services under their own one-size-fits-all offering.
And if they are successful at what they do, they will always find themselves being targeted by vendors hoping to gain access to their customers as one of the chosen providers. Which, in turn, probably means more conversations with their existing vendors who are understandably anxious to make sure they remain among the chosen few.
It all sounds like a bit of a slog – and it probably is. Some of it can’t be avoided, some of it can. But even if purging vendors when you have too many can be liberating, it can also take time and effort. So that can be a different form of vendor fatigue.
I suppose that, in the interests of fairness, we ought to ask if vendors ever suffer from MSP fatigue. I haven’t heard anyone mention it. But there’s a lot more MSPs than vendors, so you do have to wonder.
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