Five influential gadflies of the enterprise tech world have joined forces to defend the interests of IT administrators everywhere.

Calling themselves the Enterprise Advocates, the self-styled software superheroes describe themselves as

a highly visible group of like minded people who ‘bat’ for the buyer side in the buyer-vendor relationship [and] draw on more than 100 years combined experience, backgrounds as diverse as Gartner, Forrester, PwC, Deloitte and Sony Playstation.

The self-styled defenders of the helpless include former Forrester analyst Ray Wang, former PwC and Gartner analyst Vinnie Mirchandani, as well as independent consultants Oliver Marks, Dennis Howlett and Frank Scavo, and plan to blog on behalf of beleaguered enterprise IT folks everywhere, hoping that their combined voices will have more power than if they go it alone.

Most of these guys have their eyes on traditional enterprise software vendors like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft – and, most notably, their onerous maintenance contracts – but Scavo also keeps an eagle eye on software-as-a-service vendors like Salesforce.com, which boasts that it offers more cost-effective services thanks to its multi-tenant architecture (which means the cost of developing a single instance of the application can be shared by all customers).

But even while SaaS vendors depend on keeping customers happy because they’re selling an ongoing subscription rather than a hunk of software for a lot of upfront cash, customers need to deal with occasional service outages, maintenance windows and complex integration issues. That’s where Scavo plays a role, as he says, “Just cuz you’re SaaS doesn’t mean you get a pass!”

In other words, denizens of the multi-tenant software world get their association lawyer.

[Image source: Photo by kevindooley via Flickr]