Is IT vendor consolidation really worth it?

Nobody sets out to run 101 different tools, but as the company gets bigger and keeps finding new problems that need specific fixes, trying one platform and deciding on the next eventually becomes a pilot that never got decommissioned, a point solution bought to fix one problem, and a tool a departed employee championed that nobody owns anymore. It all adds up quickly.

Okta’s 2025 Businesses at Work report found that the average organization in its dataset now runs 101 applications, the first time that number has cracked triple digits. Every one of those tools needs a license renewed, an integration maintained, and someone who knows how to support it when it breaks.

This article looks at the real costs of having too many vendors, how to tell if vendor consolidation is worth it for your organization, and how to proceed.

The real cost of running too many vendors

Every tool adds cost that never shows up on the licence line by itself. It shows up in what you’re paying twice for, what it takes to keep everything talking to each other, what it costs just to manage the paperwork, and what it does to your ability to see what’s actually happening across your environment.

More specifically:

Duplicate licensing and support costs

When two or more tools do roughly the same job, you’re often paying twice for licences, support contracts, and renewal cycles that could be consolidated into one. This shows up constantly in MSP environments that have grown through acquisition or client handoffs, where one team still runs the RMM platform they started with while another inherited a different one from a previous provider, and nobody has gone back to reconcile the two.

In fact, the UK government’s 2025 State of Digital Government Review found that seven resellers were supplying Google products across 12 departments. That fragmented purchasing resulted in roughly 10% extra cost because of missed volume discounts.

The catch is that a lower licence bill isn’t automatically a lower cost. If the replacement adds friction to every remote session or forces technicians to repeat authentication, the labor cost can erase the savings. Count the recurring technician time alongside the licence fee, not just the invoice total.

Integration overhead that never shows up on an invoice

Every additional tool in the stack is another connection someone has to build, monitor, and fix when something changes upstream. If your organization runs a few hundred applications, then your IT management team is spending a costly amount of time designing, building, and testing custom integrations between them.

That’s time not spent on work that actually needs a skilled employee, so your technicians lose time moving between systems or tracing where an alert, ticket, or automation stopped flowing, and the more vendors involved, the more places that chain can break.

Procurement and contract management complexity

Fewer vendors usually means fewer contracts, renewal dates, and separate negotiations for IT and procurement to track. This is easy to underestimate until you’ve actually tried to audit a stack that grew organically. Different departments or client teams buy overlapping tools independently, licence terms drift out of sync, and nobody has full visibility into what the organization is actually paying for across every agreement.

Consolidating those agreements doesn’t just save money. It makes it possible to track what you own, coordinate renewals, and scale usage without starting another purchasing process from scratch every time a team needs more seats.

Security operations spread too thin

More products means more accounts, configurations, alerts, and activity logs for your security team to track, and that complexity has a measurable cost. Every tool you have slows your ability to detect, respond to, and recover from incidents.

Fewer tools makes it easier to see what’s happening across your environment and who’s responsible when something goes wrong, but only if what’s left still covers you properly. Reducing tool count should never be the goal by itself.

Does consolidation actually deliver?

The same research that shows consolidation can pay off also shows exactly where it goes wrong, and which organizations shouldn’t be attempting it in the first place.

For example, R1 RCM’s CEO stated that the company delivered approximately $30 million in synergies in 2023 from integrating Cloudmed, the revenue intelligence platform it had acquired the year before. That figure is due to the broader integration effort and not just vendor consolidation in isolation, but it’s still good evidence that consolidation can contribute to measurable financial gains when it removes genuine duplication as part of a wider integration effort, not that cutting vendors alone creates savings.

The caveats to that include:

• Vendor lock-in: The harder a platform is to leave, the more control shifts to the vendor. BCG’s 2025 study on platform dependency found that 75% of firms are concerned about the cost of technical migration if they ever need to switch, 64% about lost productivity during the transition, and 63% about downtime.
• A larger point of failure: Concentration risk isn’t limited to a full outage. If several workflows depend on one provider or you’ve got a software license audit incoming, a single degraded service can affect more of the operation at once.
• Losing specialist capability: An all-in-one platform can cover a function without doing it as well as a specialist tool. BCG argues that in the AI era, adaptability (not legacy scale) is now the best bet for creating value, and that CIOs will need faster, more flexible decision systems to lead the next wave of transformation. Essentially, if the consolidated option adds friction to a high-volume workflow, removing the specialist can cost more in technician time than it saves in licence fees.

So what does that mean?

» Here’s the hidden cost of legacy IT

When consolidation doesn’t pay off

Consolidation doesn’t pay off when the savings are outweighed by weaker tools, added workarounds, or the cost of moving away from systems that already fit the business well.

That points to a poor fit for organizations with highly specialized workflows or fast-changing technical needs, where flexibility matters more than saving money by having everything under one provider. It doesn’t mean those organizations should avoid consolidation entirely, only that a specialist tool doing an important job well is worth keeping until a broader platform can genuinely match it.

6 steps to consolidate vendors to save money and effort

Getting from “we have too many vendors” to a consolidated stack that’s actually better needs an actual strategy. Though it will probably be different for every organization, here’s a basic flow to help you understand what to do:

Step 1: Inventory the stack and flag genuine overlap

To actually understand what to consolidate, you need a complete record of every vendor and tool in use, and a first pass at where two or more of them do the same job. So for each tool, record the following:

• What it does
• Who uses it
• What it costs
• When the contract renews
• What depends on it

Then compare that list function by function to find where coverage genuinely overlaps. This step is diagnostic only. It tells you where to look next, not what to cut.

Step 2: Validate the overlap before you touch anything

This step is a check on whether what looks redundant on paper is actually redundant in practice. You’ll need to review usage, must-have features, performance, security, support quality, and integrations for each overlapping tool, and talk directly to the technicians and users who rely on it.

Something that looks duplicated in a spreadsheet may still be supporting an automation, an escalation path, or a client requirement nobody thought to list.

Warning: Skipping this step is one of the most common ways consolidation projects go wrong. A tool that gets removed before anyone understands what depends on it creates a big gap with IT issues for no reason.

Step 3: Decide platform or specialist, by environment, not ideology

This is the actual decision point between consolidating a function onto a broader platform or keeping a specialist tool for it. You’ll need to judge each function on its own terms rather than applying a blanket rule. An all-in-one platform makes sense when it handles the core workload properly and lowers full cost without weakening daily support.

Atera, for example, brings remote monitoring and management, ticketing, patch management, and automation together under one login, so a device alert can move straight into endpoint context, a ticket, and a remediation workflow without switching systems. All of that comes from per-technician pricing, so costs don’t have to scale as your endpoints do.

But keep a specialist tool where it clearly does an important job better or meets a security, compliance, or performance requirement the broader platform can’t. One product may connect faster, while another handles stored credentials or repeated authentication better, and a locked-down domain doesn’t place the same value on that as a simple endpoint does.

Step 4: Calculate the real cost and productivity impact

A full, year-long comparison of what the current setup costs against what the consolidated setup will actually cost can help you see the bigger picture beyond just the licence-line difference.

First, manually total the current setup’s cost over a year, including:

• Licences
• Support
• Renewals
• Administration time
• Time lost to repeated work

Then total the full cost of the proposed setup, including:

• Migration
• Training
• Cancellation fees
• Any period where both systems have to run side by side

For productivity, calculate the technician minutes lost or saved per session, multiply by expected session volume and employment cost, and apply the same approach to repeated administrative tasks. Run the comparison over a full 12 months rather than the first few weeks, since early migration friction can make a sound decision look bad if you measure too soon.

Step 5: Test, then migrate in stages

This is the actual execution, done in a way that keeps a rollback path open the entire time. To do it successfully, pilot the replacement with lower-risk users or workloads first, check performance and support, train and upskill users, and keep the old system available until the replacement is stable.

Only fully retire a tool once you have a working rollback plan and the new setup has proven itself under real use, not just in testing. If the move involves a platform like Atera, patch and maintenance work can run through automation profiles for the scheduled and rule-triggered side of the job, while specialist remote-access tools like Splashtop stay in the workflow where they’re the better operational fit, so the migration consolidates the core management layer without forcing every technician onto a single method by default.

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Step 6: Measure what actually changed and review every renewal

To find out if consolidation was actually worth it, compare:

• Software spend
• Licence usage
• Ticket-handling time
• Outages
• Support quality
• User feedback
• Final migration cost against the original baseline

Also check whether the move made the organization harder to shift again later by reviewing data portability, realistic replacement options, the effort needed to rebuild integrations, and exposure to future price increases.

In future, use each contract renewal as a checkpoint to ask whether the tool is still being used, whether another platform now covers the same function, and whether the cost still makes sense. Assign clear ownership of that review, since unmanaged overlap tends to creep back in exactly the way it built up the first time.

» Don’t miss our top ticket handling best practices and our guide to automating your ticket escalation process

What actually makes consolidation worth it

The final verdict is that yes, IT vendor consolidation is worth it when it’s needed, but the number of vendors on the invoice was never the real measure of success. What matters is whether the environment got easier to run, cheaper to maintain, and no worse at doing the job it was already doing. That’s the standard every consolidation decision should be held to, not the length of the list it got cut down to.

Atera brings infrastructure monitoring, ticketing, patching, and automation into a single platform without forcing every specialist tool out of the workflow. RMM and PSA under one login, with room for tools like Splashtop where a specialist option is still the better fit. For IT teams and MSPs weighing which vendors are actually worth keeping, that’s what consolidation done right looks like.