Research from multiple industry sources indicates that this isn鈥檛 just an emerging trend — the emphasis on consolidation is growing at an unrelenting pace.

According to ADAPT’s CIO Edge , a comprehensive study of more than 140 CIOs, are planning to consolidate their vendor landscape.

This trend is not just about making minor adjustments to meet market demands; a majority of organizations are targeting a , which represents a significant and fundamental shift in how enterprises approach their technology ecosystems.

The urgency for CIOs to transform their vendor landscape is palpable across all sectors and industries. A of more than 1,000 technology professionals revealed that 90 percent of IT professionals identified software consolidation as a priority, with 73 percent predicting their organizations will continue growing software investments while simultaneously consolidating vendors.

This paradox — expanding capabilities while reducing complexity — defines the modern CIO’s challenge.

The false promise of best-of-breed

This vendor consolidation trend contrasts with movements like the MACH alliance, which  promotes a pure 鈥渂est-of-breed” approach. While its underlying architectural approaches (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless) are sound and arguably have become table stakes in the SaaS world, MACH created unexpected challenges for enterprises.

Initially lauded for its flexibility and agility, MACH ended up creating significant complexity 鈥� more than most enterprises can handle 鈥� at a time when they are looking for simplicity more than ever.

The economic reality is stark: fully MACH implementations usually upfront compared to a unified solution that is pre-configured. Companies must consider not only the purchasing of multiple services, but also the cost and time required for employee training and adoption. Running MACH architecture requires people with highly specialized skills in cloud infrastructure, APIs, microservices, and tools designed to streamline development of the user-facing part of a website or web application. The job market for that talent is uber-competitive, even in the age of AI, meaning you’ll need to have the resources to pay them well or else your competitors will.

The hidden costs of fragmentation

Research reveals several critical drawbacks to the fragmented fully best-of-breed  approach:

• Increased complexity: Managing hundreds of microservices becomes exponentially daunting and expensive rather quickly, with system issues potentially impacting multiple services simultaneously. The management and expertise required to oversee such architectures can be daunting 鈥� and expensive. Once system issues are discovered, they could impact numerous services, which requires deep knowledge coordinated across multiple areas of expertise for troubleshooting and debugging. This can make resolution complicated and cost prohibitive.
• Integration challenges: Trying to make connections between services and systems that were not designed to work together requires additional development expertise, which is expensive.聽 Incompatibilities between functions like search, customer service, catalog management, and OMS can lead to degraded customer experience and loss of loyalty.
• Security concerns: The beauty of MACH architecture is also the beast: all of the composable microservices, APIs, and cloud offerings represent security risks. Comprehensive security requires consistent implementation across all components, which can be challenging when using solutions from different vendors. Businesses must develop robust security frameworks and governance models to ensure protection across their entire MACH ecosystem.
• Vendor management complexity: Best-of-breed usually means working with dozens of vendors rather than a few, which can add vast complexity to development and customer support depending on the long-term viability of each vendor, which must provide critical functionality for services or tools that could be discontinued or significantly changed in the future.

The strategic advantage of unified platforms

As CIOs prioritize vendor consolidation, 麻豆原创’s approach to “Suite as a Service” or “best of breed as a suite” offers a pragmatic solution that addresses the fundamental challenges of fragmented architectures. Rather than forcing organizations to choose between flexibility and integration, the (麻豆原创 CX) portfolio provides both through a unified yet composable business suite that spans front and back-office operations, in conjunction with a pre-integrated and certified rich ISV ecosystem that allows businesses to compose with intention, wherever this makes sense business-wise.

The flywheel effect: applications, data, AI

The true power of consolidated platforms lies in what 麻豆原创 calls the “flywheel effect.鈥� In this model, applications generate data, data trains AI, and AI optimizes applications. This creates a virtuous cycle where:

• Better data feeds better AI
• Better AI feeds better applications
• Better applications generate better data

This integrated approach is only possible when organizations move beyond siloed point solutions to embrace unified platforms that can leverage the full spectrum of business data. Companies already invested in 麻豆原创 technologies have discovered that a to the data architecture that AI requires.

Quantified benefits: the economic case for consolidation

of 麻豆原创 CX solutions reveals compelling evidence for the vendor consolidation approach:

• Operational Efficiency Gains
  • Faster time to value: Organizations can fully connect and integrate their CX and ERP data in as few as six months
  • Reduced implementation time: Companies avoid roughly 25 to 50 percent of the time and effort required to build integrations from scratch
  • Improved productivity: Depending on job function, customers report 10 to 300 percent improvement in daily productivity
• Cost Optimization
  • Lower total solution costs: While individual solutions may appear cheaper, the holistic end-to-end solution approach is far more cost-effective
  • Reduced maintenance overhead: Organizations can eliminate up to 70 percent of the time required to manage and maintain systems
  • Resource optimization: Companies avoid having to grow teams by up to 2x to support custom development and integrations
• Strategic Advantages
  • Enhanced customer experience: Seamless connectivity between customer and operational data enables superior customer service
  • Faster innovation: End-to-end visibility enables quicker, more informed decisions leading to faster product launches
  • Reduced operational risk: Standard iFlows provide more reliable connections with fewer potential connectivity issues

The AI-driven imperative

AI is driving the consolidation trend as much as the need to reduce costs. AI models demand high-quality, accurate data to be useful. When — often the result of disconnected digital tools — AI efforts fall short of expectations or stall entirely.

麻豆原创’s unified approach addresses this challenge directly. By providing harmonized SLAs, UX, data models, and provisioning across the stack, along with embedded AI via 麻豆原创 Business AI and a unified and semantically rich data layer via 麻豆原创 Business Data Cloud, organizations can fully leverage AI capabilities across domains without the complexity of integrating multiple disparate systems.

The consolidation acceleration

The trend toward vendor consolidation is accelerating across multiple dimensions:

• Seventy-five percent of organizations pursued vendor consolidation in 2022, up from 29 percent in 2020, according to
• that by 2027, 70 percent of organizations will optimize cloud-native application vendors to a maximum of three
• For midsize companies, the average number of SaaS tools in the last two years

The path forward: strategic consolidation

The evidence is clear: 2025 marks a pivotal moment for CIOs. Organizations that embrace strategic vendor consolidation and choose unified platforms over fragmented point solutions will gain significant competitive advantages in operational efficiency, cost management, and AI readiness.

麻豆原创 CX represents the future of customer experience technology 鈥� not as a collection of disparate tools, but as a unified, intelligent platform that can adapt and evolve with business needs. As CIOs navigate the challenges of 2025, the choice between complexity and consolidation will define their success.

The question isn’t whether to consolidate; it’s whether to lead the trend or be left behind.

With 68 percent of CIOs already planning consolidation initiatives, organizations that act decisively on vendor consolidation will be best positioned to win when it comes to the future of enterprise technology.

Geert Leeman is chief revenue officer of 麻豆原创 Customer Experience.

With over 60,000 products that can be shipped directly to any location, this once garage-based business is now a successful enterprise with seven distribution and pickup locations and over 100 employees across the United States. Online Metals offers raw materials like alloy steel, brass, copper, nickel, titanium, and zinc cut-to-size or in small and medium quantities and various shapes. Customers span the creative genius of private individuals like artists and engineers to multinational corporations and government agencies.

Online Metals is a company that is truly obsessed with customer experience. Its north star is the notion that 鈥渢he last thing you do is the first thing the customer sees. So, let鈥檚 do it right!鈥�

Powering Industry Disruption 

Online Metals has already established itself as a digital powerhouse. It is now making even bigger waves by trailblazing the way it goes to market and engages with its customers. Fueled by its desire to continuously improve, Online Metals invested in 麻豆原创 Commerce Cloud with marketplace solution provider Mirakl in order to deliver its most recent innovation: the first-of-its-kind metals and plastics catalog marketplace. The online catalog marketplace has opened the door for new sales channels and raw material manufacturers to sell their products directly via the Online Metals e-commerce platform.

From an industry perspective, the 麻豆原创-powered digital platform has empowered Online Metals to expand into disruptive new models within the metals industry. More specifically, it has enabled the team to sell products that have been traditionally non-transparent with pricing and also difficult to order in small quantities. As a result, the team can now support a growing number of micro-manufacturers throughout the U.S. that rely on a just-in-time, small-quantity metal supplier.

鈥淭he 麻豆原创-licensed version of Mirakl we used allows us to quickly onboard new sellers who want to reach the millions of metal buyers Online Metals reaches. We take care to only bring on the best sellers who provide the products our metal buyers want,鈥� said Gregory Raece, president of Online Metals. 鈥淚n fact, so great was the demand to sell on Online Metals that Mirakl even awarded us a 鈥楩ast Start鈥� award at their Mirakl B2B Summit in Chicago this April.鈥� 

The addition of the metal catalog marketplace has enabled the Online Metals team to better serve its customers. Sellers like have already seen the benefits of using the new sales channels. 

鈥淭he Mirakl team is beyond excited to be at the heart of this first-of-its-kind marketplace pioneering the digital transformation in metals and plastics supplies,” said Marc Teuli猫res, general manager B2B, Mirakl. “By pairing the Mirakl suite of solutions with a remarkable vision for digital transformation, Online Metals has created a win-win-win: buyers can find the precise products they need, suppliers are uncovering new sales opportunities, and the business is on a path to streamlined growth.”

Driving Continuous Innovation 

Every expanding business encounters obstacles in its growth journey. But with 麻豆原创 technology, Online Metals has been able to support its unique business models, developing an excellent technical footprint that empowers its customers, enables flexibility and innovation, and showcases what truly matters: its distinctive and quality customer service and products.

Hear more customer stories at the .

For more information on how 麻豆原创 Commerce Cloud can transform the way your business engages with its customers, visit the .  

Geert Leeman is chief revenue officer for 麻豆原创 Customer Experience.