4 ways multivendor platform support helps simplify your IT management needs

The horse made way for the car. The radio made way for television. The telegram for the telephone. Just as technology has driven innovation for our world, so too does it drive innovation for your organization. And while adopting innovative technology means transforming your business, it also means adding more and more vendors to your environment.

Managing and taking full advantage of the technology, tools, and platforms in an IT environment comprised of multiple, sometimes dozens of vendors requires extensive time and expertise. While you simply want to leverage solutions that meet your business requirements and workforce needs, you’re stuck managing a myriad of support agreements, renewals, and levels of service.

Managing a multivendor environment poses its fair share of challenges. That’s why SHI offers multivendor platform (MVP) support – because you need an IT environment that improves productivity while aligning with your budget, not one that’s constantly slowing you down. Here’s why organizations like yours are leveraging SHI MVP to solve what’s next for IT management:

1. Simplify multivendor management

When an outage occurs, what’s your process for pinpointing the root cause? What steps do you have in place for determining which vendor you need to contact? For far too many organizations, managing a multivendor environment means navigating a tangled web of intersecting solutions and OEMs.

The result? By the time you know which vendor to contact and why, your organization has already suffered significant downtime and loss of functionality.

Multivendor platform support consolidates support contracts and agreements across 20 industry-leading vendors to deliver a streamlined management experience. Instead of scrambling to figure out where to begin your recovery process, SHI MVP unlocks instant access to cross-trained Level 3 engineers, available any time via a single point of accountability.

That means when outages occur, you can skip asking who, what, and why and get straight to the resolution.

2. Accelerate issue resolution

Speaking of issue resolution, any organization with a multivendor environment knows all too well how frustrating it can be trying to get support when multiple vendors’ solutions intersect. What should be a simple support call turns into hours of blame games, as Vendor A tells you your issue lies with Vendor B, and vice versa. All the while, your issue remains unresolved and more and more users become impacted.

Leveraging multivendor platform support lowers your mean time to resolution (MTTR) by dramatically reducing the steps you need to take to open support tickets, as well as the time it takes for those tickets to receive an impactful response.

SHI MVP gives your issues a real human response within about 15 minutes, upheld by a 98% average SLA (service level agreement) adherence. Your first technical contact will be a Level 3 technician responsible for resolving your issue from start to finish, eliminating the need for costly and time-consuming escalations. And because SHI MVP consolidates contracts from up to 20 different vendors, you receive the same fast and effective levels of service and support you expect from your individual agreements.

3. Reclaim control of spiraling costs

According to Spiceworks, managed services – including vendor support – can consume almost 20% of an organization’s IT budget. For organizations managing a wide variety of technology vendors, all charging premium rates for 24/7 or multi-geo support, that number can be even higher.

And when IT issues aren’t smoothly resolved, they force your IT teams away from business-critical tasks – costing your organization even more time and resources.

Multivendor platform support eliminates the need to juggle multiple premium support contracts, reducing the overheads draining away at your IT budget. With a single contract covering 20 vendors, accessible via a single point of contact, SHI MVP makes it easy to dedicate your time and resources where they’re needed most – all while issues are effortlessly resolved and agreements are simple to manage.

4. Strengthen your user experience

When managing a multivendor environment, organizations are often forced to navigate vendor-specific issues by depending on individual brilliance – that is, a single team or team member with expertise specific to that vendor. For organizations managing a dozen or more technology vendors, this means technicians must either be hyper-specialized or left with skill gaps that threaten to derail your operations when problems occur.

Multivendor platform support gives you the access to cross-trained expertise you need to fully support all your solutions, ensuring no teams or workflows are left behind. With advanced Level 3 support delivered by our internal engineers, SHI MVP ends your dependence on individual brilliance and closes the skill gaps that weaken your user experience.

When issues occur, SHI’s rapid responses and resolutions help your organization reduce total downtime – putting an end to pesky disruptions that prevent your users from maximizing their productivity. With SHI MVP, the entire IT support cycle is streamlined – from ticket creation, to contacting support, to eliminating recurring issues – improving your users’ overall experience.

Multivendor platform support: IT management, managed

With technology evolving so rapidly, it’s not uncommon for solutions to start stacking like blocks in a Jenga tower. To avoid a total collapse of your IT management, you need a way to consolidate your vendor support – because focusing on every individual block prevents you from thinking about the bigger picture.

With multivendor platform support, you unlock ease of management without sacrificing top-tier technical support. Instead of drowning in vendor contracts, support levels, and tickets, you can:

1. Simplify management with a single consolidated support contract.
2. Quickly resolve issues with rapid responses from real experts.
3. Reduce support costs by ditching dozens of premium and multi-geo agreements.
4. Ensure all your critical solutions are equally supported.

Thanks to SHI MVP, you can go about your day knowing if any issues occur, our experts are just a single phone call away – without any of the blame games, stipulations, or setbacks you’d expect from a typical multivendor environment.

Ready to solve what’s next for your IT management? Schedule a discovery call with SHI’s modern workplace experts today.