Multiple Account Managers - Same Vendor

As the big IT players (IBM, Oracle, HP, etc..) continue to acquire smaller players and broaden their offerings, they have tended to structure their sales organizations in such a way that you would have several account managers covering different parts of the vendor's portfolio targeting the same customer.

IBM has different sales teams covering hardware, software and services. Oracle has different account managers covering the technology stack or the applications.

What do CIOs think about their experience working with multiple account managers? Does the value brought in by specialization outweigh the lack of coordination? Or so you prefer a single point of contact in the form of a relationship manager?

This actually is one of my pains especially with Oracle, they have multiple account managers talking to us in addition to the call center as well.

I do not find this amusing neither does my team, the Oracle people are fighting together for our budget and there is no coordination between them.

I am sure Oracle will say it has a very big product line and must have multiple people selling it but the fact is that it is not convenient for us as customers.

I think the multi account manager approach may work for large customers as they would have different people looking after different product selections .. applications, BI, content management.

But for small customers, having to deal with multiple account managers from the same vendor is just an unnecessary pain.

Some times we are struggling with the number of sales people coming from all the different vendors and their dealers. Add to that the new approach of multiple sales people from the same vendor .. it is just crazy.

In all cases managing vendor relations is a challenge that probably warrens a discussion of its own.

We hate it but can use it to our advantage, multiple competing (for my budget) account managers from the same company .. great!
Recently the Oracle guys were competing for our BI project, one guy proposed BI Applications and the other guy proposed BI EE. We made then work so hard for the deal and played them against each other for a better price. May be woked on our part but hey, they don't talk to each other so we considered them different companies!

We don't have much trouble with the concept of multiple account managers .. we have a problem with the consolidation within the IT industry ... we have fewer and fewer vendors competing for our business and that worries me.