Try the exercise: open your company’s last bank statement and count how many recurring charges are for IT services. The odds are you’ll find five, seven, even ten different invoices. One for email, another for the CRM, another for storage, another for the phone system, another for antivirus, another for backups, another for the video conferencing platform. And every one of them has gone up at least once in the last 24 months.
That fragmentation isn’t an accident. It’s the dominant SaaS business model: break enterprise IT down into twenty separate services so you pay for each one. Stepping out of that pattern — consolidating IT vendors — is one of the most powerful levers an SME has today for saving money and simplifying operations.
The real cost (not just financial) of running 5–10 IT vendors
The problem goes beyond invoices. Fragmentation has four hidden costs that companies rarely measure properly:
Administrative cost
Every vendor means a contract, a monthly invoice, a point of contact, an annual renewal and sometimes negotiating terms. Ten vendors can mean 30–50 hours a year of purely administrative work that doesn’t show up in the P&L but does show up in the load on the finance lead and the IT manager.
Integration cost
Five SaaS tools that “integrate” with each other require maintaining connectors, API keys that expire, custom glue and documentation no one reads until something breaks. The more vendors, the more edges between them and the higher the chance an integration silently fails.
Cost of data dispersion
Information gets scattered: customers in the CRM, emails in Outlook, files in Drive, tickets in Zendesk, invoices in Holded. Answering “give me everything we know about customer X” goes from a search to a project.
Vulnerability cost
Every vendor is a risk vector: passwords to manage, permissions to revoke when someone leaves, third-party breaches that hit you without you having failed at anything. Ten vendors is ten different locks to maintain.
What “consolidating” means without lowering the bar
Consolidating vendors isn’t “everything on Google Workspace” or “everything on Microsoft 365”. That’s not consolidating, it’s swapping the dependency. Real consolidation means moving most of your IT infrastructure into a single, integrated, controlled environment, while keeping or improving functionality.
The typical components that can be unified onto one platform:
- ERP and sales/finance management.
- Business email.
- IP telephony and call routing.
- Document storage and collaboration.
- Video conferencing and internal messaging.
- Web hosting and internal applications.
- Fleet and asset GPS tracking.
- Backups and continuity.
- Perimeter firewall and network security.
It’s not about everything living on the same physical server. It’s about everything living in the same operational environment: same provider, same dedicated infrastructure, same credentials, same contract, same invoice.
The five concrete benefits of consolidating
- One invoice. A single fixed amount, monthly or annual, with no surprises. CFOs value this above almost anything else.
- One support contact. When something fails, there aren’t three vendors blaming each other. One technical team that knows your whole stack and is accountable for it working.
- Native integration, not patched. When services live together by design, they know each other. Your email knows about your ERP contacts, your phone system knows your internal users, your backups cover everything at once.
- Scaling without per-user penalties. You add people to the team without the monthly bill multiplying. The classic “per-licence” model disappears once you own the environment.
- Real data sovereignty. You know where your data lives, under which law and with which contract. End of the impossible GDPR map across ten vendors in different countries. We unpack this in the article on digital sovereignty for SMEs.
How to do it without halting operations
Consolidating doesn’t mean cutting everything off on a Monday. The pattern that works in SMEs:
- Honest inventory: a real list of every IT service you pay for, with annual cost and criticality. Many companies discover forgotten contracts or duplications here.
- Dependency map: which service depends on which. You can’t move email before you have SSO; you can’t shut down a backup SaaS before you’ve validated the new one.
- Designing the consolidated environment: what infrastructure will host which services, what technologies are used, which integrations are native and which need connectors.
- Phased migration with overlap: never cut off an existing vendor before the new one is running with real data and real users. Minimum 2–4 weeks of parallel running per service.
- Team training: short role-based sessions, not a generic course. Make sure no one needs the old service to do their job before cancelling it.
- Closing contracts and measurable savings: cancelling old subscriptions. This is where the saving starts showing up in the bank account.
In NEXCORE, our dedicated IT infrastructure platform, we unify ERP, IP telephony, business email, web hosting, GPS tracking and backups into a single environment. Consolidation is done in phases, with hands-on guidance and without halting operations for a single day.
Why fragmented SaaS is so hard to leave
There are structural reasons why so many companies remain tied to a vendor jigsaw nobody consciously designed:
- Market incentives: each SaaS aims to maximise its individual ARR, not to optimise your stack.
- Accumulated decisions: each service was contracted at a different moment for reasons no one quite remembers. Nobody designed the whole.
- Perceived friction of changing: migration costs feel higher than continuing to pay, even when the 3-year maths says otherwise.
- Skilled sales motions: every vendor has an account manager, loyalty programmes and offers that delay churn.
Recognising these dynamics helps see them for what they are: forces that don’t have to determine your decisions.
Common mistakes when consolidating
- Trying to migrate everything at once. Legitimate ambition, guaranteed chaos. Always phased.
- Underestimating internal resistance. Changing tools people have used for years generates friction. Training and internal narrative matter as much as the technical side.
- Consolidating onto another proprietary vendor. If you swap 10 SaaS tools for 1 equally closed SaaS, you haven’t consolidated, you’ve simplified the dependency. The valuable move is consolidating onto dedicated, open infrastructure.
- Not documenting the final architecture. What you build today has to be maintainable in 2 years. Operational documentation from day one, not at the end.
- Forgetting the post-migration phase. Consolidating without a plan for ongoing operations is just postponing the next round of chaos.
Consolidation + sovereignty: the combination that compounds
Consolidating for its own sake is already valuable. Consolidating onto dedicated, open-source-based infrastructure pulls two levers at once: savings and control. The savings come from not paying per-licence; the control comes from not depending on decisions made by a remote provider.
This approach links to other pieces of the ecosystem. The choice between public and private cloud tilts towards private when you consolidate, because the ROI on dedicated hardware appears sooner. Replacing Microsoft 365 with an open-source collaboration platform becomes natural once you have infrastructure under your control. And adopting private AI becomes a complement, not a technology leap.
The same applies across the rest of the stack: a modern perimeter firewall makes more operational sense protecting a consolidated ecosystem than trying to umbrella 10 different services, and migrating to a modular open-source ERP fits naturally as the first step in consolidation.
Frequently asked questions
From how many IT vendors does consolidation make sense?
Once admin and integration costs start piling up, typically from 4–5 relevant recurring vendors. If your business has 3 well-integrated, stable SaaS tools, there’s probably no urgency. If it has 8 and someone is complaining every month about issues between them, the moment is clear.
How much do you actually save by consolidating?
Highly variable depending on size and starting point. In 30–80-employee SMEs that consolidate 6–10 vendors onto a dedicated infrastructure like NEXCORE, typical savings sit in the 25–45% annual range from year two onwards, once the initial migration has been amortised.
What if my industry requires a very specific SaaS?
You keep it. Consolidating doesn’t mean eliminating every exception; it means moving everything that’s commodity (email, storage, ERP, collaboration) into a unified environment. If your sector requires a specialised tool (clinical software, vertical ERP, etc.), that lives alongside the consolidated environment via targeted integrations.
What are the risks of concentrating everything on one vendor?
Concentration risk is real, but it’s mitigated by choosing well: dedicated (not shared) infrastructure, contracts with clear SLAs, data exportable in standard formats at any time, and open-source-based technology. With those three conditions, consolidating isn’t vendor lock-in — it’s reversible operational simplification.
What happens to active contracts that haven’t expired?
Renewal dates are mapped and migration is planned within those windows. The norm is to keep what you can’t cancel until natural expiry and consolidate progressively. Cancelling with penalties only makes sense if the annual saving clearly outweighs them.
Can the consolidated provider raise prices like SaaS vendors do?
They can, but with much tighter clauses. A typical dedicated-infrastructure contract fixes prices for 2–3 years with inflation-indexed reviews, not discretionary hikes. And if it does happen, having dedicated (or exportable) infrastructure means you can migrate in months, not years.
Conclusion
IT fragmentation in SMEs is a technical and financial debt that grows without anyone seeing it. Consolidating vendors onto dedicated, open infrastructure turns that debt into savings, control and peace of mind. It’s not a small project, but it’s one of the most rewarding moves an SME can make today.
What surprises people when it’s executed well isn’t the saving — that’s expected — but the operational calm: knowing what you have, where it lives, who maintains it, and how it gets fixed if something fails. That’s the real reward of consolidation.
Want us to look at your current stack and send you a consolidation proposal with concrete numbers? Get in touch and a NEXUMIA specialist will respond.
