Having multiple vendors is not a bad thing, after all.
It’s not unusual for business partners to fail to see eye-to-eye on everything. Finding and cultivating a strategic partner relationship is often easier said than done.
The “strategic” part is important. A strategic partnership is one where the long-term goals of both parties are aligned, and this is not always the case. In the world of managed services, this misalignment is often called “vendor lock-in.” It’s difficult to achieve business goals and long-term ambitions when you have to rely on a single partner for everything.
An organisation with a single vendor who offers SAP Business One, IT licensing, and cloud hosting service in a single package quickly becomes essential. If that vendor’s interests are not perfectly aligned with their customers, it is the customer who will suffer. This is an especially frequent case with SAP Business One vendors, which is why SMB Solutions carefully qualifies its partnerships and encourages transparent partner independence for its community.
Where Does Strategic Misalignment Come From?
Developing and maintaining SAP Business One instances for customers is a technically demanding task. Vendors have to invest in a wide variety of SAP-specific skills and demonstrate expertise in order to generate value for their partners. Those partners often do not have the skillset, capability, or capacity to set up their own cloud-hosted business solutions, so they search for a vendor who understands cloud hosting and SAP Business One. But organisations with cloud hosting and SAP Business One expertise are typically vendors who also sell SAP Business One – direct competitors.
This can make it difficult or impossible to cultivate true strategic alignment. The end result is that partners entrust a single vendor for all of their technical needs. This option carries its own strategic risks. It makes the organisation entirely dependent on a single vendor, limiting their ability to gain a competitive edge or implement comprehensive business continuity solutions.
In short, being overly dependent on a single vendor locks you into a partnership with that vendor. That is the essence of vendor lock-in.
How SMB Solutions Prevents Vendor Lock-In
We don’t want our partners to feel entirely beholden to our goals and business ambitions. Instead, we want to work with partners and customers whose goals and ambitions match our own.
SMB Solutions achieves this in an elegant way: we do not sell SAP Business One licenses, support, or consulting. Our customers can rely on our expertise to leverage the benefits of their cloud technology and successfully host SAP Business One without creating a conflict of interest.
If one of our customers decides that their relationship with their SAP Business One partner is not working, they can switch vendors without having to lose their hosting solution and managed services in the process. This prevents vendor lock-in, promotes partner independence and ensures that organisations can always choose the path that suits their business needs best.
Get in touch today to learn more about SMB Solutions Cloud Services SAP Business One Cloud Hosting and MSP Services available today.