I've spent almost three decades inside the IT channel — as a field engineer, a dot-com buyer, a service provider operator, and now as an independent advisor. I've been on every side of the table. And I can tell you that the IT market is built for sellers, not buyers.
As a field engineer, I went on sales calls with salespeople and then stayed to build what they sold. I watched IT teams who were experts at running their business get outmaneuvered by vendor sales teams who did this all day, every day. I watched colleagues push solutions they didn't believe in because they hadn't hit their annual purchasing threshold with the OEM they actually wanted to sell.
As a buyer at multiple dot-coms, I lived the other side. A salesperson lied to get a meeting, selling a product his company didn't even make — when I caught him, he told me "sometimes you have to be creative to get your foot in the door." I sat in a room with a dozen Compaq engineers presenting a platform they knew was about to be killed. Executives defaulted to the market leader at 4–5x the cost of the alternative because it felt safe. I signed contracts only to find out later I overpaid. I bought "redundancy" that wasn't redundant. I dealt with salespeople who vanished the moment the ink dried.
Then I built a service provider — Phyber Communications — datacenter, network, voice — and ran it for 15 years. Good margins, annuity income, real infrastructure. But there was always a tension: no matter how well we served our clients, some of them would never fully trust our recommendations because we were selling ourselves. That bothered me more than anything.
The moment that changed everything was a conversation with a CTO I'd worked with since 2003. He asked me to help with a cloud and CDN migration. I told him it wasn't something I could resell — it didn't fit our service model. His response: "I don't care that your name isn't on the invoice. I trust you to make sure we get this right."
That was it. I exited the service provider business — the contracts, the floorspace, the millions in operational overhead — and started ITBroker.com. Not because it was easy. Because I realized this is my life's work.
As an independent advisor, I see all of those stories repeat — and worse. Providers pushing solutions because it's the only thing they can get signed, not because it's the right fit. VARs bundling "best of breed" stacks that are really just the best economic partnership they could negotiate. Resellers trashing competitors they don't carry. Salespeople disappearing after the deal closes. The difference now is I've seen every version of this, and when we're involved, we can protect our clients from it.
The thing people don't expect is that independence doesn't just help the buyer. I had a friend at a VAR venting about how all customers lie — about timelines, budgets, who else they're evaluating, playing vendors against each other. He wasn't wrong. The system creates distrust on both sides. When we're involved, we bring integrity to the process. We can be honest with both sides without risk and get outcomes that everyone wants.
I still get calls from CTOs who already signed their renewal — only to learn they paid the incumbent ignorance tax. Competitors on the market would have done the same thing for almost 80% less. There's nothing I can do at that point. It happens more often than it should. And every time it does, it reminds me why this company exists.
Someone should be working for the buyer. That's all this is.
Max Clark, Founder & CEO
This is the question sophisticated buyers always ask, and the one most advisory firms dance around. Here's our answer: We're paid by the vendor — but our commission is identical regardless of which vendor you choose.
Whether you select Vendor A or Vendor B, our commission is the same. This is the structural mechanism that guarantees our independence: there is zero financial incentive to steer you toward any particular solution.
We've worked across 967 providers. We absolutely have opinions about who's great and who isn't — but those opinions are shaped by your stack, your size, your geography, and your segment. Not by who pays us more.
The only thing that grows our business is getting it right for you.
We work with companies of 200–2,000+ employees.
Organizations large enough that technology decisions carry significant consequences, but not so large that they have a 50-person IT procurement team.
Whether you're facing a specific technology decision or just want to understand whether independent advisory makes sense — the conversation starts the same way.
25 minutes. No pitch. No prep.
