[latchkey]

> A lot of this mentality has to do with wanting a throat to choke if something goes south.

You're absolutely right about this on many levels. I also heard that quite a few times from my CEO, even though we often went with single smaller providers for things because he also wanted to cut corners.

In this case though, I'd say it was more about nepotism. The CEO wanted the deal with his old pals in exchange for access to the IBM sales pipeline so that we could sell their customers on storage deals on our hardware deployment. The only way to get access to the deals was to buy IBM hardware that was extremely over priced and far more "capable" than what we actually needed.

The fact that their sales teams outright lied about things they didn't even fully understand, was sickening for me. Thankfully other people on my team stepped up and helped prevent anything from moving forward.

I agree with you, automation is key.