IT Consultants for Small Businesses

• Small businesses tend to hire IT consultants for their needs as they cannot afford to have a full-time IT employee.
• Larger companies would usually have a full-time individual on the payroll.
• IT consultants for small business argue that it would be cheaper for small companies to hire them than to recruit a full-time employee.
• However, when these companies acquire a web server, they start needing numerous other specialist services and require IT consultants to perform them.
• Other IT services that can required by small businesses include payroll, email system, ecommerce systems, network and computer protection, and data backup.

Examples of Partnerships

• Small business consultancies such as CMIT Solutions have exclusive partnerships with vendors such as Dell, Microsoft, Lexmark, Intuit, Barracuda, and Datto. 

Partnerships with IT Vendors

• IT consultants are motivated to partner with vendors to obtain better terms in their contracts with them, but also to benefit from a better flexibility in terms of supplying conditions, and be able to offer cost-effective solutions to their clients.
• Other IT consulting companies claim to be vendor-neutral to be able to provide objective recommendations based on the specific needs of their clients.
• Traditionally, IT consultants enter into partnership agreements with numerous vendors to have access to a large array of offerings, and vendors provide them with training and certification. 
• Partner IT consultants are also paid commissions by the vendor when they conclude sales with their clients.
• This is called the "reseller partnership" and has been the main model of the IT consultant-vendor partnership for decades.
• However, the model is changing with the decrease of commissions and vendors now prefer to deal directly with the client.
• This affects smaller consultancies more, such as Envisian, who decided to strategically limit the number of vendors with which they partner and train.  
• The company also decided to stop relying only on commissions from their vendor partners and become more independent and objective.
• Envisian chose to remain independent and objective by trading the commission on a potential partner product sale for the lower ‘finders’ fee of recommending a competitor.