OEM landscape for Indian IT buyers: how to choose without lock-in
A field guide to selecting compute, networking and security OEMs that integrate cleanly with your existing estate.
Picking an OEM used to mean picking a religion. That era is over. The buyers we work with want coherent operations across vendors, and they want the freedom to swap one out without a quarter of consulting spend.
The integration-first scorecard
Before shortlisting, score each OEM on five dimensions:
- Native interoperability with the identity provider you already run
- Quality of API and event surfaces (not just dashboards)
- India-specific support depth, replacement SLAs, language coverage
- Pricing transparency on multi-year refresh
- Roadmap alignment with where your business is going, not where the OEM is going
Categories worth consolidating
Compute, hyperconverged and primary storage usually consolidate well. Networking and security are where multi-vendor pays off, best-of-breed firewall plus best-of-breed SD-WAN often beats a single stack at the same price point.
Our integrated OEM bench
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