By using a single vendor, Baptista, feels he gains economies of scale, systems are easy to replace, and management is easier.

Baptista believes you do loose some competitiveness by relying on one vendor, but said that relationships matter and he has had one with HP for 15 years, "and we're really happy with the products."

Patrick Thibodeau covers SaaS and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld. Follow Patrick on Twitter at , or subscribe to . His e-mail address is .

in Computerworld's Data Center Topic Center.