what do you guys think about the future of IT vendor management consulting. Future prospects/demand, salary, power, influence, etc.I suppose there will always be a place for someone to manage vendors...

Vendor mgt is a reasonably hot field right now. The concept of Vendor Management Office is taking off- much more than just getting the best deals from vendors; more about forming strategic partnerships with vendors and really workign together. The skills for this are the usual high level business skills- business mgt, company mgt, klnowledge of prod/svcs offered by not only your company but also the vendors , lots of multi tasking. In a lot of large companies, they will have many vendors - so utilising creativity in making non-obvious relationships between vendors that work with your company to derive win-win for all parties involved will see you with a fast ticket to the C-suite.

Fast track to what job in the C-suite? Can not see anyone in a job like this making it up there.

Obviously, you have to be good at vendor management- really developing the relationships with your vendors as strategic partners ( rather than , say, SLA Monitoring ) for the betterment of your company, but also the vendor company. The skills to do this successfully require most of what i said before- basically CIO level ( or near it) skills. If a really good vendor manager can show betterment of the comapny by utilising the resources of the vendors ( and especially in creative ways), then this will be favorably looked upon by the CIO and sr managers of the CIO office.