The Race to Vendor Consolidation: Mid-market Enterprises are Moving Away from Complexity

Vendor consolidation has emerged as the dominant priority for CIOs in 2025. For years, mid-market enterprises were told that “best-of-breed” was the holy grail. Stitch together specialized tools for every function, and you’d end up with the perfect tech stack.

The reality? Most businesses didn’t get a dream stack. They got a Frankenstein monster.

Integration costs spiraled. Data was trapped in silos. Teams spent more time managing vendors than serving customers. And instead of fueling growth, these “dream stacks” became bottlenecks.

Now, a new race is on. Mid-market leaders are moving away from tool sprawl and running toward vendor consolidation, where simplicity, speed, and scalability matter more than collecting logos in your tech stack.

The Mid-Market Enterprise Dilemma

Mid-market companies live in a tough spot. They’re not scrappy startups that can pivot overnight, and they’re not Fortune 500 giants with endless IT budgets. This middle spot is not easy as the expectations are sky-high, customers demand enterprise-grade digital experiences, but the resources to deliver them are often more limited. 

That’s why the best-of-breed pitch sounded so attractive at first. Why settle for “good enough” when you could have the sharpest tool for every job? Marketing could run on one best-in-class platform, commerce on another, analytics on a third, and so on. The theory was simple: stitch them all together, and you’d have a powerhouse stack without paying enterprise prices.

But the reality hasn’t been so kind. Mid-market businesses don’t have the luxury of massive integration teams or bottomless consulting budgets. Every new tool adds complexity: new logins, new workflows, new vendor relationships, and new integration points waiting to break. Suddenly, what looked like a modern digital strategy turns into a game of whack-a-mole, with teams spending more time managing tech than serving customers.

For mid-market leaders, complexity quickly became the enemy of growth. Instead of driving efficiency, best-of-breed stacks created silos, slowed execution, and ballooned total cost of ownership. And in a market where speed and adaptability are everything, that’s a dealbreaker.

The Hidden Costs of Best-of-Breed

On paper, best-of-breed stacks sound like the smartest play. Pick the “number one” tool in every category, connect them all together, and you’ll have a future-proof digital ecosystem.

But mid-market companies have learned the hard way: that theory comes with baggage.

Integration nightmares

Every shiny new tool needs a bridge into the rest of your stack. At first, that’s just a few connectors. But over time, it becomes a fragile web of APIs, plug-ins, and custom scripts that need constant babysitting. When one vendor updates their software, the whole bridge can snap — breaking customer journeys and draining IT resources. As one developer vented on Reddit: “We spend more time fixing integrations than buiålding features. It feels like duct-taping tools together instead of actually moving forward.”

Data silos

Your marketing team has one view of the customer, sales has another, operations something different altogether. Instead of a single source of truth, you end up with fragmented insights that don’t line up. A Reddit sales engineer put it bluntly: “Every team thinks they have the right data, but none of us are looking at the same picture.” For leaders trying to move fast, these silos create drag.

Vendor overload

It’s not just the tools themselves, it’s the people behind them. Multiple contracts to negotiate, support teams to coordinate, and roadmaps to follow. Every vendor wants your attention, and suddenly you’re spending more time in vendor meetings than customer meetings. One frustrated mid-market CIO summed it up online: “I didn’t sign up to manage vendors full-time. But that’s what best-of-breed has turned me into.”

Total cost of ownership (TCO)

That initial “flexibility” of picking the best tool at the best price doesn’t stay flexible for long. Licenses stack up, integration costs creep in, and the hidden expenses of training and maintenance pile on. 

For mid-market enterprises, these hidden costs don’t just eat into profits, they eat into agility. And in today’s market, agility is everything.

Why Mid-Market Companies Are Moving Away from Best-of-Breed: Real Pain Points

The best-of-breed model isn’t inherently bad. For very specific use cases, having a highly specialized tool can be the right call. But for mid-market enterprises trying to balance growth with limited resources, the approach often creates more challenges than advantages. When talking to leaders, developers, and practitioners, these are the recurring pain points that keep resurfacing: 

1. Tech Debt & Loss of Control

Mid-market organizations often grow their stacks organically, adding new tools as the business develops and succeeds. While this is the usual way to go, over time, it creates a patchwork of systems that are do not necessarily achieve the best results. 

And in most cases, mid-sized companies don’t actually own or fully understand their own tech. Agencies often build and manage these stacks, leaving the business reliant on outside partners for every integration, update, or fix. 

While agencies play an important role, this dependency comes at a cost. Companies lose the flexibility to move fast in-house, and instead have to wait for external developers to keep things running or build new features. 

For organizations without internal developers at all, the situation is even more challenging. Something as simple as adjusting a form workflow or adding a new integration can become a major project requiring outside help. Over-reliance on external tech partners drains budgets, slows innovation, and leaves companies vulnerable when they should be in control. 

For leaders, the real cost of complexity is not just technical debt but the loss of agility and ownership over their own digital future.

2. Cost and Resource Overload

On the surface, best-of-breed looks flexible. But multiple specialized tools mean multiple subscriptions, overlapping features, and hidden costs. Teams often discover they’re paying for licenses they barely use, or spending more on integration projects than the tools themselves.

Operational overhead also adds up: backups, updates, training, and compliance for each vendor quickly stretch lean mid-market IT teams beyond capacity. What starts as “flexibility” can turn into resource drain.

3. Security, Compliance, and Audit Risks

Every new vendor adds risk. More logins, more integrations, more data pipelines, and each one expands the attack surface. For industries operating under tight regulatory scrutiny, this is more than inconvenient; it’s a liability.

Analysts note that vendor consolidation can significantly reduce compliance complexity by centralizing audits, simplifying reporting, and giving security teams greater visibility. For mid-market firms with fewer security specialists, this simplification is critical.

4. Inefficient Workflows and Siloed Teams

Different departments often choose different tools, which leads to fragmented workflows. Marketing’s data doesn’t line up with sales, and operations runs on yet another platform. The result is misalignment, slower execution, and decision-making based on partial truths.

Martech leaders have pointed out that consolidating tools doesn’t just save money, it enables collaboration, gives everyone access to the same data, and drives stronger ROI. For mid-market enterprises, that cohesion can be the difference between agility and paralysis.

5. Practitioner Fatigue and Market Shifts

The frustrations aren’t just theoretical, they’re voiced daily by practitioners. On Reddit and in professional forums, developers and sales engineers openly question the sustainability of the SaaS sprawl:

“In mid-market … shorter sales cycles and more customers mean complexity slows us down, while simpler stacks keep things moving.”

This doesn’t mean best-of-breed is dead. It means mid-market leaders are becoming more measured, weighing the long-term cost of complexity against the short-term benefit of specialization. The lesson is clear: use best-of-breed strategically, not reflexively.

Why This Matters for Mid-Market Leaders

Combining these insights, we see a clear pattern:

• Teams are frustrated: Legacy complexity, siloed systems, and too many tools are killing morale.
• Budgets are strained: Multiply tool costs and support overhead, and the tech stack becomes a finance leech.
• Risk is rising: Security, compliance, and audit demands make decentralized tool stacks a liability, not an asset.
• Execution is sluggish: Data silos lead to misalignment, slower decisioning, and poor customer experiences.

Mid-market leaders are waking up to the fact that simplification isn't just nice—it’s essential. The shift isn’t about abandoning innovation, it’s about scaling in a way that’s smart, sustainable, and human-centric.

Why Consolidation Is Winning

Leaders are waking up to a hard truth: complexity isn’t a badge of honor, it’s a liability.

The myth of best-of-breed was that more tools meant more innovation. But in practice, more tools just meant more moving parts, more room for error, and more money burned. Mid-market executives, especially CIOs and CMOs, are now realizing that simplification is not just about efficiency, it’s about survival.

Consolidated platforms are winning because they give businesses back what sprawling stacks took away:

• Efficiency and cost control: Fewer vendors mean fewer invoices, fewer integration projects, and fewer hours wasted in troubleshooting. Mid-market CFOs are particularly vocal about this shift — what used to be dozens of license renewals is now a single, predictable subscription.
• Cohesive data and insights: With best-of-breed, every system spoke a different language. Consolidation brings the data together, giving leaders a single source of truth. In industries like finance and retail, this isn’t just convenient — it’s the difference between guessing and making confident, real-time decisions.
• Simplified adoption for teams: Employees don’t want to learn seven platforms just to do their job. A unified solution reduces training time and increases adoption rates. Our client YMCA Greater Toronto summed it up well: “Our team actually uses all our CMS now, because they’re not bouncing between five logins and dashboards.”
• Scalability without endless integrations: Growth shouldn’t mean rebuilding your stack every two years. Consolidated platforms expand with you, new features, new workflows, new integrations, without the duct tape approach. This flexibility is what allows mid-market firms to act big without being buried by enterprise-grade complexity.

From finance to martech to security, the pattern is consistent: companies are trading in their “best-of-breed sprawl” for integrated solutions that just work. The winners aren’t the businesses with the most tools,  they’re the ones with the smartest foundation

What Vendor Consolidation Unlocks

Consolidation isn’t about shrinking your toolkit, it’s about unlocking growth. By reducing noise and removing friction, businesses can finally focus on what matters most: their customers and their future.

• Clarity: Instead of juggling five dashboards, you get a single, unified view of the customer journey. That means no more guesswork, no more conflicting reports, and no more endless debates about “which system is right.” Leaders make decisions faster and with confidence.
• Speed: Every extra tool adds another place for things to break. Consolidation strips away the troubleshooting and frees teams to innovate. Projects that once took months of integration work can now launch in weeks. In competitive markets, that speed is the difference between being a follower and being first.
• Consistency: Customers don’t care what system you use. They care about whether the experience feels seamless. With a consolidated stack, every touchpoint is aligned, from website to checkout to customer service. That consistency builds trust, and trust builds loyalty.
• Resilience: The fewer moving parts, the fewer things there are to fail. A consolidated foundation makes systems more stable, easier to secure, and less vulnerable to disruption. For mid-market enterprises, resilience isn’t just an IT goal, it’s a growth strategy.

In short, consolidation doesn’t mean doing less. It means creating the clarity, speed, consistency, and resilience your business needs to grow without friction.

How Core dna Fits Into the Consolidation Shift

Mid-market enterprises don’t just need fewer tools, what they need is a smarter foundation. That’s where Core dna comes in. We designed Core dna as a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) that unifies content, commerce, and orchestration in a single environment. 

Instead of piecing together a CMS here, an eCommerce platform there, and a dozen plug-ins in between, Core dna provides one platform flexible enough to manage complex business needs — but simple enough to scale without the integration tax.

With Core dna, mid-market enteprises businesses gain: 

• One platform, multiple capabilities: CMS, commerce, orchestration, personalization, and workflows built in, no plugin roulette. 
• True agility: Launch new sites, campaigns, or regions in weeks, not months. 
• A single source of truth: Cohesive data across marketing, sales, and operations. 
• Resilience at scale: Secure, cloud-native architecture without the headaches of constant updates and patchwork fixes. 

For franchises, nonprofits, membership organizations, and B2B enterprises alike, Core dna replaces complexity with clarity and helps leaders focus on what drives growth, not what drains resources. Consolidation isn’t just a trend; it’s the future of digital growth. And Core dna is built to power it.

The New Playbook for Growth

The race to vendor consolidation is on, and mid-market leaders who embrace it will gain the edge. Complexity slows you down. Consolidation frees you up to focus on what matters: your customers, your growth, and your impact.

Because in today’s market, it’s not the business with the biggest stack that wins. It’s the one with the smartest one.