IT Partners Is a VAR You Should Know

VAR handle: IT Partners
Hails from: Phoenix
Born-on date: 2002
Top techie: Bill Cassidy, vice president of technology
Raison d'tre: Focus on data-center infrastructure consulting

Getting it done: No matter how hard they try, it's just too hard for some VARs to give up solution selling. IT Partners is one such example.

Bill Cassidy and about a half-dozen of his colleagues formed Phoenix-based IT Partners toward the end of 2002. The business has grown steadily. Revenue in 2004 was $9 million, growing to $14 million 2005. Last year, business skyrocketed to $22 million, and the company is hoping to come close to $40 million this year.

Having worked for a number of VARs focused on networking, such as Sentinel Technologies and Expanets -- the group has typically moved from VAR to VAR together -- the original plan was to get away from product reselling.

For the first year, IT Partners was quite successful focusing just on consulting. But with an interest in growing the business, Cassidy and his colleagues found it hard to complete work without having a hand in making sure products were available.

"We found ourselves doing projects where we had dependencies around products," Cassidy says. "A lot of times, the organizations that were doing projects didn't have the best handle on how they procured their stuff, and whatever the stuff was that we needed, it maybe didn't show up on time."

IT Partners' core focus is midsize and large enterprises. Much of its clientele is state and local agencies, but it has a good number of corporate clients as well.

"We like to stay away from the 'S' and the lower end of the 'M' in SMB," says.

How the company positions itself depends on the customer. IT Partners likes to be an impartial third party that doesn't push products but rather helps organizations solve specific problems. That's why Cassidy has limited the number of formal partnerships to HP, VMWare and Microsoft for the company's broad approach to the market.

But in cases where the customer wants the solution provider to act on behalf of the OEM supplier, IT Partners does so.

One big area that is propelling IT Partners is system virtualization. The company is currently a VMWare Premier Partner. In fact, Cassidy says virtualization is the foundation of everything it does.

"It isn't even a conversation anymore," he says. "Everyone is really down that path, and we're leveraging it to almost every extent we can. It helps us have [disaster recovery] conversations, it helps us have plain, old server consolidation conversations with customers, and it is modifying the way people think in terms of whether or not to buy another server."

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