[greedo]

It's not so much that the CIO/CTO wants the ability to call up a vendor, or have his employees call up a vendor for support. What a CIO/CTO wants is the ability to tell his CEO that "Yeah, we're having a problem with our database, but it's Oracle so we're good. I'm kicking the vendor's ass, but he's going to make things right on our next renewal." It's all about plausible deniability, and goes back to the days of "Nobody got fired for buying IBM."