Whether you're an ISV, an OEM, a startup, or an established company, landing inside a GSI doesn't have to be the multi-year political project most vendors turn it into, provided your technology measurably improves their client outcomes. Having a working reseller channel doesn't translate: different buyers, different economics, different proof. I can help you position your technology in front of the right people in the right towers, framed and aligned to the integrator's existing consulting practices and delivery teams. And if you're weighing the alliance itself, I can help set realistic C-suite expectations on timeline, investment, and whether your selling motion aligns with what a GSI values.
See the practiceA divestiture, cloud migration, rising costs and extended data storage lead times, or regulatory audit is forcing a reckoning with file shares, mailboxes, and SharePoint sprawl nobody's touched in a decade.
See the practiceThe vendor pitches blur together, and you're leaning toward the best salesperson's solution, which may not be the best fit for your requirements. I provide an objective assessment of all the key platforms, leveraging subject matter experts who ask the right questions and deliver a fact-based, unbiased recommendation.
See the practiceExecution at enterprise weight. OGS Group delivers results to Fortune 500 companies, mid-market companies, and the largest system integrators. The technologies I bring are backed by real delivery infrastructure: from data classification at petabyte scale, to the full Avant Pathfinder catalog spanning communications, security, CX, and beyond, to the integrator relationships that turn a good technology into an adopted one.
Landing inside a global system integrator is a different motion than any other channel. Some technologies are too new or too specialized to be on an integrator's radar. Others come from established companies with a working reseller channel that simply doesn't translate. Both end up outside the practices where their technology would do the most good.
I position technology inside the integrator's existing consulting practices and delivery teams, and get it in front of the right people in the right towers. There's a real difference between being an approved vendor and being built into one of their go-to-market programs. Having spent over a decade in those rooms, on the product side, the channel side, and inside the GSI ecosystem, I know what an integrator actually adopts and why.
And for the vendor weighing the alliance itself: most alliance teams burn the budget on the wrong relationships. Before you invest, it's worth understanding the executive commitment it takes and a realistic timeline: what your C-suite should expect, and whether your selling motion is aligned to what a GSI values.
Most enterprises don't have a data problem. They have an unstructured-data problem: petabytes of email, files, SharePoint, and shadow drives that nobody can confidently classify and nobody wants to be the one to delete.
That's fine until a transaction surfaces it. A divestiture demands clean separation of buyer vs. seller data. A cloud migration meets data-residency rules. A regulator asks for an audit trail that doesn't exist. Suddenly the thing nobody owned is on the critical path.
I help enterprise companies and system integrators get out of that corner quickly, defensibly, and without re-platforming the enterprise. At-scale classification work performed in partnership with Congruity360; leveraging a proven methodology and modular approach to address what's on a critical path and in scope.
Every contact-center and unified-comms vendor has a deck that says the same five things. Every one of them is the "leader." The buyer's actual problem isn't information — it's too much of it, all of it from people paid to align their solution to whatever your requirements are and close the deal.
This is the one practice where I don't pick for you. Instead you get subject matter experts across every key vendor's platform, who assess your requirements, uncover the needs you haven't defined yet, and recommend what actually fits, along with the most cost-effective way to acquire it. Access to the Avant Pathfinder catalog means real cost and reference data on every credible provider, without making a sales call to get it.
Whether you're replacing an incumbent, consolidating after a merger, buying your first cloud platform, or trying to figure out the best way to migrate Teams in a hybrid environment with a CSP's SIP trunks, you get a recommendation that holds up in a board review and a solution that delivers what was promised.
Whether you need a specific solution to a specific problem, or a broader assessment of competing technologies, I can help. I've selectively partnered with companies whose solutions address unique problems. Where a company has more than one need, I'm positioned to bring more than one solution. Below are the relationships behind that work.
Congruity360 is the company behind Classify360, an unstructured data management and security platform that discovers, classifies, and remediates data at petabyte scale across on-prem, cloud, and SaaS environments using content-level ML and GenAI.
Their platform is uniquely engineered for unstructured data problems at scale, delivering the accuracy and chain-of-custody evidence needed to satisfy DOJ and other oversight requirements, protect retained IP, avoid millions in unnecessary migration costs, compress TSAs, and produce the defensible inventory and risk-remediation artifacts CISOs and CIOs need for boards and regulators. Most data-classification tools handle controlled environments well and quietly stop working at petabyte scale. Classify360 doesn't.
ATC is a technology advisory firm providing vendor-agnostic counsel on UCaaS, CCaaS, voice networks, and customer experience for mid-market and enterprise clients. ATC's access to Avant Communications' Pathfinder catalog reaches well beyond communications into Cloud, Connectivity, Security, SASE, Colocation, and CX-AI, with the analytics and verified transaction data needed to make decisions that don't depend on a single vendor's pitch.
I joined ATC as a Principal for the bench behind the catalog. No single advisor can go deep across all of those categories credibly. Avant's subject matter experts can, which means a client gets a specialist's read and the reasoning behind it, not just a recommendation. I bring a specific solution to a client when one uniquely fits their requirements, and provide vendor-neutral analysis when several companies in a category offer similar capabilities.
Some of the best enterprise technology comes from companies the market hasn't found yet: pre-launch, in stealth, or early enough that there's no analyst coverage and no reference customer a GSI would recognize.
These are the technologies that are easiest to miss and hardest to evaluate: new and unique solutions aimed at solving problems an integrator's clients already have, but without the proof in the marketplace that a practice lead or solution architect typically looks for before championing it internally. That's a harder starting position than an established vendor faces, and it changes the focus and the messaging. An integrator can always wait for the market to de-risk a new technology, so the reasons to align early have to be clearly defined and worth more than waiting. Getting that right, and proving your value to the integrator without creating channel conflict, is work that has to happen before the meeting, not after.
Three briefs developed for two of the practice areas above to provide examples of how I think about these problems on paper. Free to download. No email address required. Schedule a conversation if you'd like to know more.
"In complex divestitures, infrastructure separation is rarely the primary constraint. Unstructured data becomes the dominant execution bottleneck."
"Divestitures represent peak exposure events. Without structured classification and minimization, unstructured data becomes the primary vector of risk."
"A communications decision is no longer just a platform purchase. It is a choice about operating model."
More to come. Cloud migration, GSI alliance strategy, AI in customer operations.
Michael D. O'Keefe founded OGS Group after more than three decades across enterprise infrastructure ISVs, OEMs, and telecommunications companies, in direct sales, sales leadership, partner ecosystems, and global system integrator alliance programs. He's stood on every side of the enterprise technology table, which is how he knows both which technology fits a problem and how to get it in front of the people who should see it.
He built OGS Group around a single discipline: bringing enterprise technology solutions that uniquely address business requirements to the buyers and integrators who need them, for specific use cases. In some instances, that's technology the market hasn't discovered yet: excellent, but unknown, and needing to be framed in the vernacular unique to system integrators. His work currently spans addressing unstructured-data risk, communications-platform selection, and helping build GSI alliance partnerships for these unique solutions, as well as bringing solutions directly to end users to meet specific requirements.
Over three decades, he has held senior roles across enterprise infrastructure, data, and communications at companies including EMC, Veritas/Symantec, VCE, Pure Storage, and Spirent. That work spanned direct sales, sales leadership, partner ecosystems, and global system integrator alliances. That range is the point: having sat on every side of the enterprise technology transaction, he can recognize a solution worth a client's attention and position it credibly to the people who should evaluate it.