When a security pro gets different vendor solutions to work with each other, it’s a cause for celebration. Unfortunately, most security stories seem like they’re written by George R.R. Martin and they don’t resolve to “happily ever after” conditions. Yes, things can run well for a while, even a good long while, but there comes a day for many a partnership where the parties involved part ways and their products no longer play well with each other.

This isn’t just something in an update breaking a functionality. That gets fixed with a call to tech support and developers writing a hotfix. This is the kind of breakup that gets announced on page 23 of a vendor website or which is mentioned quietly by a sales account manager that can’t renew licensing on an integration package. The vendors, for strategic or other reasons, are no longer on speaking terms.

Vendor A releases a product that competes directly with vendor B.

In this scenario, vendor A launches its new product and has a clear choice: adopt our product or do without the integration. This move is possible only if A has a big market share. It doesn’t have to be a dominating share, just a big one. It doesn’t even have to be in the security area – maybe A was eyeing a way it could get into security, and saw this as its market entry opportunity.

At a small company, they’re all ears if A’s solution is cheaper to implement than B. If that cost reduction is achieved by discounts over both the old A product and A’s competing product, so be it. Cheaper is cheaper. If the competing product from A delivers most of what they get from B, then the small company can learn to live without the features from B that they no longer will get.

If A’s solution isn’t cheaper, then the small company will learn to live without the direct integration. Maybe some whiz writes a PowerShell script that produces a cool CSV or something to help bring data together, but such whizzes are rare to find at small companies. And if they’re found at small companies, chances are they’re producing code to improve profitability.

Alternately, if there’s a vendor C that does integrate with B – and is cheaper than A – then maybe it’s time to drop A altogether.

At the medium-sized company, it’s more likely that they’ll do a bake-off between the competing products and use features in combination with pricing as determinants about which product they go with. It’s less likely that they’d drop one or the other entirely all at once, but when the products come up for lifecycle renewal, they can make a switch at that time.

For the large company, it may come down to a question of how big A is. If A is truly huge, then it’s bye-bye B and hello A if the company IT leadership wants to standardize on A. If the leadership, however, is wary of A’s size, then it keeps B and A is a non-starter. These are decisions that come down to executive strategy and have little to do with price or features. Not to say that price and features will be mentioned in conversations about keeping or switching, but the underlying rationale will be the large company’s overall relationship with big vendor A.

So why wouldn’t A compete with B if A didn’t have a big market share? It would be because A doesn’t just integrate with B. A integrates with lots of other vendors and, because it can’t control the market, bills itself as being comfortable in multi-vendor environments.

And if A has a miniscule market share, competing with B is what is commonly known as a “mistake” and will result in A going out of business or withdrawing its competing product.

Vendor A terminates an exclusive partnership with B, is now working directly with C

This scenario assumes a tight integration between A and B, more so than what is normally offered in an exposed API or a SQL transaction query. Maybe the two companies were drawing closer to each other, with a merger likely, but things changed and now A is with C, not B. This can happen regardless of A’s market share – provided that C is at least as big as B if A is itself small.

In this scenario, pricing is not likely to be a factor. C will likely cost about as much as B, once the per-endpoint licenses are tallied up. This will come down to a question of features and whether or not A+C is, overall, better than A running side by side with B. If yes, then B will be on its way out to make way for C. The only companies keeping B will be the ones that didn’t do any testing and that won’t talk to sales teams.

If no, then the executives at A will have some hard pondering to do when they lose revenue on their software that integrates with B, and there being lack of sales for integration with C to make up for it. How could something like this come to be? Easy. People lie to executives, especially so to executives that want to be lied to. If A’s leadership is surrounded by mediocre sycophants, A will make some huge blunders.

Vendor A cuts integration with B because support costs exceed revenue

No hard feelings in this scenario. There just simply aren’t enough people using B to justify the support costs of keeping the connector between A and B up and running.

At the small company, it just means lower overall cost to drop renewal on that product. Since there’s no other product that does B’s job that integrates with A, there’s no compelling story arising out of this scenario to justify replacing any product… unless there’s a cheaper product that does A’s job that integrates with B… Absent that, the company learns that integration is a fleeting thing and may well make a decision to not integrate other products because they don’t want to get burned again.

The medium company may make the same choices, perhaps choosing to have all security systems pump information into a data lake and then try and make sense of things. There’s a good chance that the lake will always be there, but few will swim in it.

At the large company, an interesting mathematical problem emerges: would subsidizing support with a custom agreement be cheaper than living without the integration? If yes, then while the rest of the world lives without the connection, the large company will keep it going… and going… and going… and going… to the point at where, ten or twenty years down the line, some new person is shocked to see that software still running somewhere! Think it can’t happen? Just ask Microsoft how many Windows 3.11 support contracts they still have with major customers…