Itwerx is a service-disabled veteran-owned managed IT provider serving businesses in Seattle, Bellevue, Everett, Lynnwood and Snohomish County, founded in 2005, and part of that work is vendor management: holding suppliers to what they sold you and finding the way through when a vendor stops being the answer.
Most businesses have been here before, or know someone who has: a core application or third-party service that the business genuinely depends on, and the vendor behind it has started to slide. Sometimes there is no alternative and the business is stuck with it. Most of the time, though, things did not start out that way, and the warning signs were visible well before the real damage was done.
The typical lifecycle
Software, including SaaS, tends to follow a recognizable arc: someone has an idea or writes a tool out of necessity, it gains traction with early adopters and gets expanded and improved, it reaches maturity with decent market share and real profitability, and then ownership or management changes. That change is often where the trouble starts.
Not every change is bad – a merger between genuine competitors can go well. But the more common causes – a founder retiring, private equity looking for a quick return, a “buy and kill” acquisition by a competitor – tend not to.
The signs, before the damage is done
Nobody has the time to track the ownership news of every vendor a business relies on, but the decline usually shows up in the same handful of places first:
- Your account rep changes so often that you have to search old emails to figure out who it currently is.
- The only way to reach support is through the sales line.
- Support consists of untrained representatives following a flowchart, unable to actually understand the problem, with no meaningful escalation path.
- A renewal that used to be month-to-month is now a three-to-five-year term, at a price increase – often with a further discount offered for paying that whole term up front.
When a company starts gutting the teams that are the only thing actually standing behind its product, that is a reliable sign it is becoming one of these, and it is worth evaluating alternatives while there is still time to do it on your own schedule rather than in an emergency.
Itwerx Corp is a service-disabled veteran-owned small business providing IT services across Seattle, Bellevue, Everett and Snohomish County. This is the kind of thing our vendor management work deals with – talk to us about yours.
