The advisors your vendors don't want you to hire

Why we exist

Enterprise IT negotiation in the 2010s was an asymmetric information problem. Vendors knew their commercial flexibility, their internal incentive structure, their pricing matrices and their renewal mechanics in granular detail. Buyers knew their own requirements and a public list price. The asymmetry produced predictable outcomes: 25–40 percent overpay on first-time deals, 9–15 percent uplift compounded on renewals, audit claims that materially exceeded actual entitlement gaps, and contractual posture skewed entirely to the vendor's protection.

The firm was founded in 2015 to close the asymmetry. The premise was simple: if the negotiation is fought between the buyer's procurement function and the vendor's commercial leadership, the vendor wins. If the negotiation is fought between former vendor commercial leadership representing the buyer, and the vendor's current commercial leadership, the playing field levels. Eleven years later, that premise is unchanged. Every senior consultant in the firm spent the first ten to twenty years of their career inside an Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, AWS, Google Cloud, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, VMware/Broadcom, IBM, Cisco or Adobe commercial organisation. The next ten years are spent on the other side of the table.

The firm has grown deliberately. We do not take retainer commitments from vendors. We do not accept referral fees from technology providers. We do not offer implementation services or post-contract managed support. The economic alignment is exclusively with the buyer; the engagement model does not permit conflict.

Team structure

The firm operates through three vendor practice groups and three cross-cutting capability groups. Every engagement is staffed with practice depth and capability depth. The consultants are organised by former employer cluster rather than by sector, because the negotiation dynamics are vendor-specific and the operational knowledge does not transfer cleanly across vendor families.

The three cross-cutting capability groups support every practice: the legal and contracts group (former in-house counsel from Oracle, SAP and Microsoft), the audit defence group (former Big Four software audit partners and vendor LMS/GLAS leadership), and the benchmarking and intelligence group (full-time analysts maintaining the engagement library across 500+ enterprise deals).

Our values

The firm operates by four values. They are not slogans; they are the operating constraints inside which every engagement is structured and every consultant is evaluated.

Why benchmarks matter more than experience

The most material asset of the firm is not the consultant roster: it is the engagement library. Every commercial negotiation closed by the firm since 2015 is anonymised, structured and indexed against vendor, product family, deal size, geography, industry vertical, term length, opening proposal, intermediate positions and final settlement. The library covers more than 500 enterprise engagements representing $2.4B of contract value across 17 named vendor families and 38 distinct product lines.

Vendor pricing is opaque because vendor pricing is confidential, and the absence of credible peer comparison is the single largest factor in buyer overpay. Generic industry benchmarks published by analyst firms or procurement networks operate at a level of abstraction too high for negotiation: average discount across all customers tells the buyer nothing about realistic discount for their specific deal architecture. The engagement library operates at the level of specific transactions: same vendor, same product family, same deal size band, same industry vertical, same geography, same term length. The benchmark cited in any client conversation is drawn from comparable transactions, not aggregated industry averages.

This is why the firm declines engagements where comparable transactions do not exist. A first-time engagement against a vendor product family with no library precedent receives a clear caveat to the client, and the engagement scope is structured accordingly. Where the library is deep, the negotiation outcome is highly predictable; where the library is thin, the engagement is exploratory and the commitments more measured.

Client profile

The firm serves Fortune 500, FTSE 100, DAX 40, CAC 40, Nikkei 225 and equivalent listed and privately-held enterprises across financial services, retail, manufacturing, hospitality, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, media, professional services, government and defence. The shared characteristic across the client base is not industry but contract scale: typical client annual IT vendor spend ranges from $40M to $1.2B, with engagement-eligible vendor relationships in the $2M to $80M annual range. Below those thresholds the in-house procurement function generally has the leverage and cycle time to negotiate effectively without external support; above those thresholds the negotiation complexity, the audit risk concentration and the regulatory posture make external buyer-side advisory cost-justified at almost any fee.

Client engagements are typically initiated by one of three triggers: a Tier-1 vendor renewal at T-180 to T-90 from term end, an unsolicited vendor audit notice, or a strategic event (acquisition, divestiture, transformation programme, AI procurement framework instalment) that materially shifts the vendor relationship architecture. The firm declines engagements where the buyer's commercial position is structurally weak (zero alternative, no commercial flexibility, immovable timeline) because no advisory work overcomes those constraints; the right counsel in that scenario is to absorb the current cycle, document the lessons and rebuild leverage for the next.

The engagement model

Engagements take three principal shapes. Renewal-led engagements (the majority of our work) run 10–16 weeks against a known vendor renewal date. Audit-defence engagements compress to 6–10 weeks against a vendor audit notice. Strategic transformation engagements (ERP replacement, hyperscale cloud commit structuring, AI procurement framework instalment) extend to 4–8 months including post-signature governance instalment. Every engagement begins with a confidential 72-hour position assessment delivered to the client commercial and legal leadership before scope is finalised.

The firm is engaged by Chief Information Officers, Chief Financial Officers, Heads of Procurement, General Counsel and Vendor Management Office leads. Engagements are sponsored at the C-suite level because the contractual outcomes require Executive Committee or Board approval at most enterprise clients. We work alongside in-house procurement and legal teams, not in place of them; the in-house function retains relationship continuity with the vendor after our engagement closes.

Fees are structured as fixed-scope engagement fees with optional success-share components on quantified savings. We do not work on pure contingency, because contingency economics misalign the consultant with the client on questions of contractual posture and long-term vendor relationship. We do not bill hourly, because hourly billing misaligns the consultant with the engagement timeline.

Geographies

The firm operates globally from three offices. London serves UK, EMEA and Africa engagements. New York serves North America and Latin America engagements. Singapore serves Asia-Pacific engagements. Most multinational engagements are staffed across two or three offices to align with vendor regional commercial structures, which materially affects negotiation timing and approval pathways.

For office addresses and engagement enquiries, see our office locations page. For practice-specific guidance start at our practices index; for vendor-specific intelligence start at vendor intelligence.

Strategic advisory — not legal advice. The firm provides commercial advisory and negotiation execution services. Engagement-specific legal review is the responsibility of the client's in-house or external counsel.