By Argantic CEO Garry Ackerman
Customers are being sold an appealing idea: pick one vendor, get one stack, and everything will be simpler. It sounds tidy. It also happens to be mostly wrong.
Microsoft, Google and AWS do provide the foundations for modern cloud journeys. But their “default” components, across compute, storage, security and analytics, are designed to be broad, not bespoke. What looks neat on a product roadmap often fails the moment a real business with legacy systems, regulatory constraints and unique SLAs tries to fit inside it.
That’s where the row of inconvenient truths begins. First: best-of-breed rarely comes from a single supplier. Second: customers don’t have the time to sit through dozens of vendor pitches and workshops. Third: every vendor now wants direct access to your people, which turns buying cycles into a full-time job for customers who already don’t have the time.
Here’s the practical consequence: customers are paying in time, complexity and suboptimal outcomes. Vendors push for second meetings, workshops, PoCs and “deep dives” – each of which looks like progress on a slide deck, and each of which consumes hours that no IT leader really has. Vendors aren’t evil here; they’re doing what vendor organisations do. But customers can’t be treated as a marketing channel.
That’s where system integrators, not as middlemen but as orchestrators, become indispensable. We’ve spent years aggregating real-world experience across industries and vendors. That aggregation isn’t academic: it’s how you avoid building a cloud that looks great on paper and collapses under real workloads. We take the time-sink off the customer and get vendors to compete on merit, not on who shouts the loudest.
What should change?
- Treat vendor engagement as managed work. Customers shouldn’t have to host every vendor’s workshop. A trusted integrator should filter, prioritise, and run the vendor conversations on the customer’s behalf. That reduces friction and surfaces only the relevant options.
- Design for fit, not for brand consistency. Best-of-breed components stitched together by experience produce better outcomes than a single-vendor bundle that overlooks corner cases – compliance, latency, backup/restore realities, and cost optimisation.
- Force vendors to justify inclusion with real value, not roadmap promises. If a vendor’s solution doesn’t demonstrably reduce risk, cost, or time-to-market for your specific use case, it shouldn’t be in the architecture.
This is uncomfortable for the vendor-first narrative because it removes the comfortable notion that one supplier can do everything. It’s also uncomfortable for resellers who prefer simple deals. But it’s good for customers and ultimately, for vendors who build genuinely competitive solutions.
At Argantic we’ve started doing that heavy lifting. We engage vendors on behalf of our clients, explain the investment profile and the role each product genuinely plays, and make sure everybody understands that modern solutions are, by design, multi-vendor. The result is fewer workshops for customers, quicker decisions, and solutions that actually deliver.
If you’re still letting vendors guide the agenda, you’re outsourcing your architecture to whoever can schedule the most meetings. That’s not strategy, it’s convenience dressed as progress.
Customers deserve better. They need partners who will take the meetings, vet the options, and fight for a best-fit solution. System integrators who accept that role aren’t just useful – they’re essential.
