Let’s assume you’re a company scouting for vendors for a variety of business-critical IT projects. Every candidate you approach wants to scoop up as much of your business as possible. Should you try to find the best partner for each task, or look for a one-stop shop?

The theoretical advantages of relying on one company, rather than several, are clear: less time lost in juggling multiple contacts, greater leverage resulting from being a more important client, and lowered risk (assuming your partner is trustworthy). Conversely, throwing your entire lot in with a single vendor seems inherently risky as well.

For many years now, multisourcing has been a rising trend, representing $7.2 billion in global IT and IT-enabled services contracts in 2007 alone. Firms are increasingly choosing the flexibility and built-in competition between vendors that are part and parcel of multisourcing.

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