Accelerate Partners announced a new partnership with FinOps provider Procure IT last week, blending total cost of ownership and broker models.
The technology advisory firm will bring Procure IT’s managed intelligence software and services into its private equity practice and to 50 of its largest clients. Sales development representatives from both companies are dialing prospective private equity firms, with five vendor partners footing the bill using marketing funds.
Procure IT’s platform was previously available for Accelerate to sell with commission through the Telarus tech services distributor portfolio. A partnership between the two companies allows Accelerate to directly bill clients for software. The joint model supports Accelerate deepening client relationships with or without the broker model.
“Some clients don't have a lot of broker revenue because they're more in-house hardware; they want to control it themselves and don’t have a lot of services,” Procure IT CEO and Managing Partner Randy Jeter told Channel Dive. “[Accelerate is] going to be able to shape the deal specific to the client’s needs.”
Accelerate’s leaders said the partnership will provide access to the software and data it needs to level up its private equity practice. CEO JP Panzica said Accelerate has dozens of PE firms in its customer base it has helped with the technology side of potential acquisitions. However, Accelerate wanted to get into the underlying portfolio companies of those PE firms. In order to do so, it needed to provide an actual product that captured and analyzed data from IT environments.
“Our thesis then was, we need to take it to a portfolio company, but we also need a managed intelligence platform that is going to help us identify assets,” Panzica said. “It's going to look at cloud resources. It's going to look at SaaS utilization. It's going to look at telecom expense management.”
Cost management software is proliferating as TA firms looking to stick with clients across the technology stack and IT teams tighten their budgets.
TAs typically sold telecom expense management products from vendors that have moved out of telecom, adding SaaS and cloud costs to their tracking tools. A select number of TAs have also started building their own software.
Unlike legacy TEM vendors, the company, which was founded in 2023, doesn’t have to retrofit its software to track AI spending.With more than 30 employees, Procure can develop and support the platform more effectively than a small TA firm.
“There are mature TA firms that have already validated a version of this,” Panzica said. “They're not doing it to the extent of what Randy's software does with cloud FinOps and SaaS FinOps. They're doing more telecom expense management, but those are natural progressions off of this.”
Jeter said Procure IT is poised to displace the providers that separately manage costs for telecom, SaaS, cloud and AI. He added that those software services cost $150,000 to $200,000 per year. The broker model is a secret weapon for both Procure IT and Accelerate, because the customer doesn’t pay the broker; the vendor does.
“If you want to use [Accelerate] for all of your tech procurement and you don't want to pay for software, we'll offset the software costs in exchange for commissions on the procurement side,” Panzica said.
A TCO model
AI has made cost savings models increasingly attractive to TAs, which typically draw revenue through sales commissions.
That’s partly because TAs typically don’t have contracts to sell frontier LLMs or agentic AI platforms. Most AI products sold by TAs are embedded in center systems. In the meantime, private equity firms are looking to introduce AI into their portfolio companies for promised savings, according to John Manganiello, Accelerate’s CSO and private equity practice leader.
Some TAs have become full-blown resellers in order to obtain SKUs for their customers. Accelerate took a different route.
“That changes the enterprise value of your business doing that,” Panzica said. “It gives you an identity problem. It also gives you less routes to liquidity because you're a blended kind of company, whereas we are still 100% an advisory company, and that will never change.”
A separation between TAs that lean into expense management and those that focus only on sales is coming, JSG CEO and Cofounder Janet Schijns told Channel Dive at the Avant Special Forces Summit.
“The TAs that are the greatest of all time are saying, ‘I'm going to evolve my business. I'm adding pro services, and part of my pro services will definitely be FinOps,’” Schijns said.
