When doing business in 100 countries, what if vendor A has support in 80 of those countries, and vendor B has good presence in the last 20 ? What if you require a vendor that has presence in all countries and this limits your RFPs to a single vendor ? Does your company run semi autonomous subsidiaries in each country with its own IT/networking staff ? Who buys local connectivity, HQ in USA or the local subsidiary ? So, if you maintain links to 100 countries around the globe, do you want central management ? can it provide localised support in local languages and local times zones from head office ? Or would that stretch it beyond reasonable capacity and you start to need support from different locations anyways ? Does HQ staff have legal knowledge or all local regulations? Do they have experience bribing officials where bribing is part of business? What happens when country X has special legal requirements, and country Y has conflicting requirememnts that prevent uniform deployment ? It wasn't that long ago that US equipment with encryption couldn't be exported everywhere because encryption was considered a military secret. Consider that in today's environment, it isn't so ludicrous to suggest that a country may require that the equipment has a "backdoor". So it is best to allow that country to have its own separate equipment with minimal management abilities to/from that country to prevent that country's government from interfering with your opps in other countries. It may seem more efficient to manage everything centrally but... I'll use an airline analogy: Southwest airlines was quite succesful with a single plane type. Common training for pilots, all planes maintained from a central hangar, common spare parts etc. If it had 100 planes, and all were maintained from one hangar capable of maintaining 100 planes, this was much better than having 50 737s, and 50 A 320s, requiring 2 separate hangars, each used at only 50% capacity. BUT, if you have 200 planes, then the second batch of planes could be Airbus, and maintained in their own hangar, resulting in both hangars being used at 100% capacity. The point is that beyond a certain size, the advantages of having everything common are not as important, and having dfferent equipment gives you more leverage when negotiating, as well as isolates bugs/viruses to only part of your network. Another aspect is of innovation. When HQ standardizes with one vendor and it is all centralliy managed, it becomes really hard to introduce new technologies because your systems are cast into concrete. If you give each country some autonomy for local equipment, they may be experimenting with different vendors and could find that some new vendor is much better than the one used at HQ, and that experience could then percolate up to headquarters (instead of everything decided at HQ and percolating down to each branch office/subsidiary). At the end of the day, it all depends on how autonomous each subsidiary is around the world. This is quite different from having 100 branches in the USA, each getting physical connection from the same fibre vendor and each operating under same laws, and minimal time zones (still 5 hours between New York and Hawaii though).