Early in my career, I worked at Shandam Consulting, a vendor-agnostic firm that did HIPAA assessments and network security work for California state agencies. It was my first exposure to a consultancy that genuinely did not care which vendor's logo was on the box. Every recommendation was based on fit, cost, and operational reality. When I left and started working alongside vendor-aligned consultancies, the difference was immediate and jarring.
That experience is why I founded Mazel Solutions with a strict rule: no reseller agreements, no vendor quotas, no referral kickbacks. After 27 years in enterprise networking and security, I can tell you with certainty that vendor relationships are the single largest hidden driver of inflated IT costs. Not incompetence. Not complexity. Incentives.
How the Vendor-Partner Model Actually Works
Most IT consultancies operate as authorized resellers or partners for one or more major vendors — Cisco, Palo Alto, Fortinet, Microsoft, VMware, and so on. These partnerships come with tiered incentive structures. The more product a consultancy sells, the higher their discount tier, the bigger their rebates, and the more co-marketing dollars they receive. Some tiers require minimum annual sales targets.
This creates an incentive that is perfectly rational for the consultancy and perfectly misaligned with your interests. When your consultant earns a 20% margin on Vendor A's firewall and a 5% margin on Vendor B's, the recommendation is tilted before the first meeting starts. They do not need to lie to you. They just need to frame the comparison in a way that favors the product that pays them more.
Real Examples I Have Seen
The oversized firewall. A mid-size healthcare company was sold a pair of enterprise-grade next-generation firewalls with a five-year support contract totaling over $180,000. Their traffic volume and feature requirements could have been met by a model two tiers down at roughly $65,000 for the same contract term. The consultancy was a Platinum partner for that vendor. The client had no way to know they were paying for throughput capacity they would never use.
The unnecessary platform migration.A state agency was advised to migrate from a stable, well-understood switching platform to a newer software-defined networking solution. The justification was "future-proofing." The real driver was that the consulting firm had just achieved a new partner tier with the SDN vendor and needed to hit an annual sales target. The migration introduced 14 months of instability and required additional consulting hours to resolve. The original platform would have served them for another five years.
The feature bundle upsell. A logistics company needed basic network monitoring. They were sold a full SIEM platform with advanced threat analytics, user behavior analytics, and a machine learning module — a $120,000 annual subscription. What they actually needed was a $15,000 monitoring solution with SNMP polling and syslog alerting. The SIEM sat at 8% utilization for two years before they called me to audit it.
What Vendor-Agnostic Means in Practice
When I walk into an engagement, I have no inventory to move, no quota to hit, and no rebate to protect. My only financial incentive is that you are satisfied enough to call me again or refer me to someone else. That changes every conversation.
It means I can recommend Palo Alto for one client and Fortinet for another based purely on their traffic patterns, staff expertise, integration requirements, and budget. It means I can tell you that the equipment you already own is sufficient and that you should spend money on training your team instead of replacing hardware. It means I can recommend open-source tools where they genuinely fit, without worrying about losing a sales commission.
I have deployed Cisco ACI fabrics, Palo Alto firewalls, Juniper SRX clusters, F5 load balancers, and VMware NSX environments in production. I have also told clients not to buy any of those products when a simpler solution was the right answer. That is only possible when the consultant has no financial relationship with the vendor.
How to Protect Yourself
Whether you work with me or someone else, here are four questions that will save you money on every technology purchase:
- 1. "Do you hold a reseller agreement or partner status with any vendor you are recommending?" If the answer is yes, you need an independent second opinion on the sizing and product selection. Not necessarily a different vendor — just a different perspective on whether you need the specific model and license tier being proposed.
- 2. "What is the least expensive option that meets our actual requirements?" Vendor-aligned consultants rarely volunteer the cheapest path. Make them justify the gap between the minimum viable solution and what they are proposing.
- 3. "What would you recommend if we could only spend half this budget?"This forces creative thinking and often reveals that the "essential" features in the original proposal were actually optional.
- 4. "Can we phase this deployment over 18 months instead of doing everything at once?" Phased rollouts let you validate the solution at smaller scale before committing the full budget. Consultants with sales quotas prefer big one-time purchases. Consultants focused on your outcome prefer phased approaches that reduce risk.
The Bottom Line
I have been on both sides of this. I have seen the internal emails about partner tier targets. I have sat in meetings where the recommendation was decided before the client's requirements were fully understood. And I have spent the last seven years at Mazel Solutions doing it differently — recommending the right tool for the job regardless of who makes it, and sleeping well because of it.
If your technology budget feels bloated, the first place to look is not your team's efficiency or your infrastructure's complexity. It is the incentive structure of the people advising you. Fix that, and the savings follow.