What is vendor sprawl?

As businesses have become more digital, many specialized applications have been developed for all different kinds of services, whether it be for recruiting new employees, providing security for data stores or analyzing data on sales leads.

While the never-ending variety of applications available to businesses can be a boon, this creates the perfect setting for collecting numerous applications or solutions, also known as Vendor Sprawl.

What is vendor sprawl and what is the cause?

In the simplest of terms, vendor sprawl means “my business has too many applications.” Looked at in a more measured way, vendor sprawl is inefficiency, whether financial or technical, that results from having application redundancies (i.e. having more than one application for the same functionality in different departments) or applications that don’t integrate well together (i.e. where information has to be manually retrieved from one system and manually entered into another).

Vendor sprawl has many causes, including:

 

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