Helping technology brokers analyze commission statements and track install dates is a niche business that's nonetheless booming.
Professional services firm ForgeOS increased its base of TA clients by 115% and expanded the IT spend under management by 150% year over year in 2025. A revamped go-to-market strategy, strengthened relationships with technology services distributors and partner word-of-mouth propelled the growth.
The company, which designed its platform to assist short-staffed TA firms, onboarded multiple heavyweights last year.
“We ended up formalizing relationships with several partners with seven-figure-plus books of business,” ForgeOS President and COO Marc Gold told Channel Dive. “I'll go out on a limb and say I did not expect that to happen as quickly,”
Founded in late 2022 as a spin-off from the TA firm Ten4, ForgeOS has already pivoted. The company tiered its services, pivoted from a revenue-sharing model to subscription pricing, and framed its platform as a friend rather than a foe to TSDs.
Partner feedback drove the changes.
“We took a lot of lumps,” Gold said. “We learned a lot of really important lessons, and I'm grateful that we learned those lessons in the capacity that we did, because without those lessons, we wouldn't be where we are today.”
ForgeOS is part of an exploding market of software and services that tackle fragmented TA processes and offer relief to the broader telecom industry. TAs historically have managed vendor and customer information with spreadsheets, PDFs and disparate portals. Excel sheets typically served as a single source of truth.
“ForgeOS has transformed that process by giving us a single, cohesive platform to run our business,” Cloud9 CEO Andy Torres told Channel Dive in an email. “After experiencing the efficiency and clarity it delivers, returning to our previous methods simply isn’t an option.”
ForgeOS is also designed to recover lost commissions. According to the company, TAs miss about 6% of vendor commissions — $6,000 for every $100,000. In some cases, vendors don’t pay until installations are complete. Commissions can also go missing when a vendor is waiting for a customer to pay an invoice.
A vendor portal only registers the missing money, not the cause. TAs that examine discrepancies must spend time hounding channel managers about commissions — time they’d prefer to spend selling.
“If you can give a partner back more time in their business, that's actual value,” said Aram Bolduc, TopSpin Tech founder and an early ForgeOS user.
Freeing up time to sell and expand revenue is a plus, but partners said that ForgeOS’s inventory management software is giving them insights on where they can sell additional products into existing accounts.
“The biggest impact has been visibility,” Catalyst Group Managing Partner Tim Kennedy told Channel Dive in an email. “By consolidating data across suppliers, contracts, commissions, and customer environments, we’re able to make more proactive, data-driven decisions and uncover opportunities faster.”
A team sport
When ForgeOS emerged, many partners thought they were an upstart TSD. So did the TSDs.
“I think initially they were looking at us as a competitor, but that has shifted really dramatically to the point now that we are viewed very favorably by the TSDs,” Gold said.
The dynamic shifted in part because ForgeOS added some of the TSDs’ top TAs, who vouched for the company’s value in commissions remediation.
TSDs, which own the vendor contracts and take a share of commissions, track and chase down lost commissions for their TA partners. By taking a proactive approach for its partners, ForgeOS hopes to find lost money for those TSDs too.
“Probably the biggest challenge we as an industry have is there's no normalization or standardization of products,” ForgeOS VP of Business Development Rosie Pottebaum said. “Three different carriers can call a product three different things, so we work in conjunction with our TSDs and with our carriers.”
When ForgeOS changed its pricing model two years ago, the shift helped distinguish it from TSDs.
“We are not a TSD,” Pottebaum said. “We never want to be.”
The value of clean data
A broader tailwind is pushing ForgeOS: rising demand for clean data.
M&A is making data a virtue. TA leaders, large and small, understand that they’ll need accurate and well-organized information for a future financial exit. They’ve also struggled to convince investors to recognize closed customer deals that have not yet yielded revenue. ForgeOS closely tracks the deal lifecycle and helps TAs show the receipts.
“To get a higher multiplier for your business, it's easier for them to do their due diligence on your business and you'll probably get closer to what you want for your business, rather than some partner who is running on Excel spreadsheets and disorganized and relies on the TSD information,” Bolduc said.
AI has reinforced the importance of organized data. As ForgeOS proceeds to expand the automation, EVP Hadley Bergh said the company feels it is building on the right foundation. She likened it to Tesla and Waymo spending upwards of a decade mapping out routes before deploying self-driving cars.
“If you take messy data from a TA, from six different TSDs and direct suppliers, and you start throwing AI on top of it, you start causing more issues than you had before,” Bergh said. “You can't automatically dispute commissions if you haven't normalized the data, and you don't have a sense of what you have from end to end.”
