With the accelerating pace of change in technology and the arrival of cloud services, the focus has shifted away from IT doing everything in-house, and toward outsourcing work to vendors. However, an increase in vendor partnership can equal an increase in tracking and managing these relationships. In April and May 2017, TechRepublic Premium conducted a survey to find out how much time IT professionals are spending on tasks related to vendor management, what their companies are gaining from these relationships, and what troubles they’re having.

Here are some key findings from the survey:

• 47% of respondents said their companies are managing more than 10 vendor relationships.
• The most popular areas to use vendors in are hardware, networks, and applications.
• IT departments are largely responsible, over other departments, for managing vendors in areas like hardware, cloud services, and security and compliance. Management responsibilities for other vendors like web development, analytics, and payment processing were equally as likely, or more likely to fall on other departments.
• 57% of respondents said their company’s IT department spends more time managing vendor relationships than it did two years ago.
• The most often cited pain points of working with vendors are poor responsiveness to help requests and constant personnel turnover at vendor companies.
• The most common benefits of working with vendors are receiving consulting and best practices, and problem-solving that can’t be done in-house.

This report contains more detailed results and analysis about vendor relationships. To read it, download the full report, Vendor management: Time commitment, benefits, and pain points.