In many cases a vendor sells more than one product (e.g. Microsoft owns Skype and Office and GitHub). In some cases, a vendor sells only one product (e.g. Osano only sells our self-titled software product).
Often a vendor will apply a different set of compliance protocols to each product, especially in the cases of larger corporations or when a product was brought into the company via an acquisition. Your privacy rights on Skype are different than your privacy rights on GitHub, even though they are owned by the same entity.
Due to this difference in product privacy versus company level privacy, in Osano you can only follow products. The organizational structure is such that a vendor has one or more products. In the situation where a vendor has only one product, that product name will likely be the same as the vendor. Products can also change ownership.
So take an example where you use product X from vendor Y. If you were using product x but following vendor Y and they sold that product to vendor Z, your vendor monitoring would now be inaccurate and you would be tasked with keeping track of M&A activity. Instead, Osano customers follow products. If those products change owners, we adjust the dataset to reflect the new ownership. The result is that you only need to worry about the products you use and follow the products you use, Osano takes care of the vendor association.
However, you do have the ability to browse your vendors and their aggregated/average data ratings across an entire portfolio of products by visiting the Vendors tab in the application.