At Wired Networks, we pride ourselves on being vendor agnostic and neutral when it comes to carriers, hardware manufacturers and cloud service providers.
We place a very high priority on finding a solution that’s right for our customers, instead of just pushing customers towards our favorite partners.
From a customer or prospect perspective, this means you can leverage Wired Networks to explore a multitude of options — all while maintaining a single throat to choke!
Recently though, we’ve noticed a growing trend of competitors being vendor apathetic or indifferent, rather than vendor agnostic.
While this may sound like a differentiation without a difference, it’s actually a dangerous trend that is sometimes mislabeled as “vendor agnostic” by the company’s taking this stance.
What is vendor agnostic?
To be clear, our definition of a vendor agnostic company is an organization that is open to all viable and established solutions, with the correct support infrastructure in place to support their customer or prospect.
Every customer has a unique set of needs and having access to a variety of vendors allows a solution provider the ability to quickly pivot to the correct vendor for each customer’s needs.
It’s important to vet all vendors before taking them to customers, and to test their solutions when relevant.
Being vendor agnostic or neutral doesn’t mean a provider doesn’t care what solutions the customer chooses — it just means the provider cares more about having the ability to provide the best possible solution for them.
What is vendor apathetic?
Increasingly, companies who claim to be vendor agnostic are more indifferent — or apathetic — than they are agnostic.
What we mean by this is that they truly don’t care what solution gets sold as long as they are the ones selling it.
The focus becomes landing the deal at all costs rather than finding a working solution for the customer.
A great example of this is a solution provider willing to sell residential networking hardware to a mid-market customer, just to keep cost low enough to win their business.
For instance, maybe a solution provider has quoted you unreliable WAN connections just to make sure they’re the cheapest option on the table.
Have you ever felt like a solution provider was trying to oversell you on a solution that was far more advanced than your network or users demanded?
There’s a good chance the underlying vendor is giving away a trip to Cancun or some other incentive in the near future and they need the additional business to qualify.
It’s a fine line because no vendor is going to claim indifference; they’ll openly portray it as being agnostic.
How to tell the difference
When evaluating solutions, a provider who is truly vendor agnostic should be able to clearly identify what problems you’re trying to solve as part of the project being discussed, and lay out how their proposed solution addresses those needs.
There’s an argument to be made for leaving room to scale when it comes to buying features you don’t need at the moment, but overall the proposed solution should be the one that most accurately addresses your most pressing needs and solves them.
Again, this is sort of a gray area. But if you evaluate your providers with this distinction in mind, you could very well avoid partnering with a company more concerned with winning at all costs than they are with the specific needs of your company and its users.
So let us ask:
What are the persistent problems facing your business today, and do you have a trusted technology partner to help you explore what possible solutions may already exist for them?
We invite to share your biggest business obstacle with the trusted experts at Wired Networks. We can come up with a creative technology solution for even the most persistent problems. We guarantee it.
