Presales, infrastructure and cloud consulting
The infrastructure bench you don't have to hire.
Architect-level infrastructure work, engaged by the job. We win bids for the companies that sell infrastructure, and advise the organisations that run it.
Two services, one bench. The same architects who size and defend bids for resellers and MSPs also sit on your side of the table when the decision is a refresh, a migration or a vendor you will live with for five years.
Presales as a service
For resellers, MSPs and system integrators. We size, design, cost and defend your bids under your brand, so you can pursue every opportunity that lands.
How presales works You run the estateInfrastructure and cloud consulting
For the people who own the estate and answer for it. Independent assessments, roadmaps, migration planning, vendor selection and M&A support — from someone with nothing to sell you.
How consulting worksto a first response on any new enquiry
from brief to a first deliverable you can put in front of a customer or a board
no reseller agreements and no OEM margin, so the advice answers to the requirement
Presales as a service
For resellers, MSPs and system integrators. A good infrastructure architect costs more than most services firms can carry, and the work never arrives evenly. Three tenders land in the same fortnight, then nothing for a month — and the person best placed to write the design is billing on a delivery project.
What it fixes
- 01You pass on bids because the response window is ten working days and nobody has time to size the storage.
- 02Your best engineer writes proposals after 9pm, and the delivery project slips.
- 03The bill of materials is padded with guesswork, so you either lose on price or win and lose the margin.
- 04The customer's CIO asks a hard question in the shortlist meeting and the room goes quiet.
- 05You hire an architect, deal flow dips for a quarter, and you are carrying a salary against no pipeline.
We are the part of the team that only shows up when there is a deal on the table. Same seniority as a hire, none of the fixed cost.
Qualify
A 60-minute call on the opportunity. You get a straight go or no-go and the win theme to build on.
Discover
Requirements workshop with your customer. Current state, growth, constraints, what the incumbent got wrong.
Design
Capacity model, high-level design, logical diagrams and rack elevations that survive scrutiny.
Cost
Bill of materials, OEM quote chasing, licensing math, and a three to five year cost of ownership model.
Respond
The written bid: compliance matrix, assumptions, risks, migration plan and the executive summary.
Defend
Technical presentation, proof of concept plan, clarification rounds and objection handling on the call.
Three ways to bring us in
Every presales engagement is white labelled. Your email domain, your templates, your logo on the deliverables.
Per bid
For firms bidding once or twice a month
A fixed fee agreed in a 30-minute scoping call before any work starts. You get the design, the bill of materials and the written response, plus attendance at the defence meeting. No retainer, no minimum.
Retainer
For firms with steady pipeline
A block of architect hours each month with a named architect who learns your accounts, your OEM partners and your pricing rules. Unused hours roll into the following month.
Embedded
For firms growing into a presales function
Two or three days a week under your brand: your email address, your deck template, your CRM. We join customer calls as part of your team, and we write the playbooks that let you hire your own architect later without starting from scratch.
What always comes back to you
Infrastructure and cloud consulting
Every vendor in your inbox has a recommendation, and every one of them is selling something. We hold no reseller agreements and earn no margin on hardware or cloud, so the advice answers to your requirement and nothing else. On premises, in cloud, or the awkward mix most estates actually are.
Assessment and health check
Two to four weeks
A structured review of what you run today: capacity and performance headroom, lifecycle and support status, resilience gaps, cloud spend against commitment coverage, and what the estate actually costs to keep running. You get a findings report with risks ranked and a prioritised list of what to fix first.Often the first engagement, and the one that scopes the rest.
Architecture and roadmap
Target state and the path to it
Target-state design and the phased plan to reach it: refresh timing, what belongs in cloud and what does not, licensing implications, and a three to five year budget shape you can take to a board without it unravelling under questioning.Includes the do-nothing baseline, so the cost of delay is explicit.
Migration and refresh planning
Planning and governance, not delivery
Wave plans, dependency mapping, runbooks, and cutover and rollback design for datacentre moves, platform changes and cloud migrations. We plan and govern the programme; your own team or your chosen integrator executes it.We stay independent of whoever does the work.
Vendor selection and RFP support
On your side of the table
We write the requirement, build the evaluation criteria, score the responses and sit with you through clarification and negotiation. Because we take nothing from the vendors being evaluated, the scoring reflects what you need rather than which discount band is available.Also useful as a sanity check on a shortlist you have already drawn up.
M&A technology support
Before the deal and after it
Technology due diligence on a target's infrastructure before you sign — what is end of life, what is under-licensed, what the real integration cost looks like. Then integration or separation planning afterwards: what merges, what stays separate, what the transition services agreement has to cover, and what it will cost to exit it.Works alongside your corporate development team and their advisers.
We do not sell the hardware, and we do not bid for the delivery work we recommend. That is the whole point of the engagement.
What we cover
Coverage across the estate, not one vendor's slice of it
The same domains whether we are writing your bid or auditing your estate. Every architect on the bench has carried a delivery pager as well as a proposal deadline, so designs are costed against real quotes and real migration effort, not list price.
Compute and virtualization
Server refresh, hyperconverged and three-tier, VMware, Nutanix, Hyper-V and Proxmox migrations, licensing changes and the cost modelling around them.
Storage and data protection
Block, file and object sizing, performance and capacity headroom, backup design, immutability, retention policy and tested recovery objectives.
Network and security
Campus and data center fabric, SD-WAN, segmentation, firewall and remote access sizing, and the compliance mapping that RFPs ask for.
Cloud and hybrid
Landing zones, migration waves, right-sizing, egress and licensing math, and a candid view of what should stay on premises.
Data center and facilities
Power and cooling budgets, rack layouts, colocation selection and comparison, structured cabling schedules and physical migration plans.
Workplace and endpoint
Device refresh, virtual desktop sizing, identity and device management, and the per-seat economics that decide those deals.
Service levels
What you can hold us to
Turnaround, from the moment you brief us
How we work with your team
Commercials
Engagement models, priced per engagement
Every engagement is scoped and quoted before any work starts, so you know the fee before you commit. Nothing is billed by surprise.
Presales engagements
Bid support
Priced per bid
One opportunity end to end: qualification, design, bill of materials, written response and the defence meeting.Scoped and fixed in a 30-minute call before work starts.
Design only
Priced per design
High-level design, capacity model and bill of materials. You write the commercial response.Useful when your sales team is strong and the gap is engineering.
Retainer
Priced per month
A monthly block of architect hours with a named architect, priority scheduling and rollover of unused hours.Most firms start at 40 hours a month.
Embedded
Priced per quarter
Two or three days a week under your brand, including template and playbook build so the capability stays with you.Minimum three months.
Consulting engagements
Assessment
Fixed scope and fixed fee
A defined review of all or part of the estate, ending in a findings report and a prioritised set of recommendations.Two to four weeks depending on size and number of sites.
Project
Priced per engagement
Roadmap, migration planning, vendor selection or M&A support, scoped against a defined deliverable and date.Quoted after a scoping call, with the deliverable written into the agreement.
Advisory retainer
Priced per month
A standing block of hours for the decisions that come up between projects — a design to sanity check, a quote to pressure test, a vendor claim to verify.Unused hours roll into the following month.
Second opinion
Fixed fee
A short, bounded review of a proposal, design or bill of materials you have already been given, with the questions you should be asking before you sign.Turned around in a few days.
Tell us which model fits and roughly what you are dealing with, and you will have a written quote within one business day.
Travel to customer sites is billed at cost and agreed in advance.
Getting started
Starting takes a week
Mutual NDA and a scoping call
Thirty minutes on what you are dealing with — the bids you keep walking away from, or the decision sitting in front of you.
One piece of work, at our risk
A live bid, or a bounded assessment. Fixed fee, agreed up front. If the output is not something you would have been proud to send or to take to your board, you do not pay it.
Choose the model that fits
Stay per engagement, move to a retainer, or embed us. Retainers run month to month after the first quarter.
Frequently asked questions
Find answers to your questions
Presales: will our customer know you are not staff?
No. We work from your email domain and your templates, and our name appears nowhere in the deliverables. That applies to written responses and to the calls we join alongside your team.
Are you tied to a particular vendor?
No. We are vendor and OEM agnostic. We design to the requirement and to what your customer already runs, then cost it against whichever platforms genuinely fit — including the ones your own partner agreements favour, when they are the right answer.
Will you work with our competitors?
Not on your named accounts, and not on a tender we have already been briefed on. That exclusivity is written into the agreement.
What if we lose the deal?
You keep every artifact, and we run a short debrief on why. Fees are for the work, not the outcome, but repeated losses mean we are qualifying badly and we will say so.
Consulting: will you bid for the work you recommend?
No. We plan and advise; your own team or an integrator of your choosing executes. We hold no reseller agreements and take no margin on hardware, so there is no version of the recommendation that pays us more.
What does an assessment actually produce?
A findings report covering capacity and performance headroom, lifecycle and support status, resilience gaps and running cost, with risks ranked and a prioritised list of what to address first. It is written to be read by a CFO as well as an engineer, and it is yours to use however you like, including putting it out to tender.
Do the two services ever conflict?
They could, so we manage it explicitly. We will not advise a buyer on a tender while also writing a bid into that same tender for one of our presales clients. If that situation arises we declare it and step back from one side before any detail changes hands.
How do we get started?
Send us the requirement and the deadline. You will have a go or no-go, with reasoning, within one business day, and a mutual NDA in place before any detail changes hands.
Get in touch
Send us the thing you are stuck on
A bid you were about to decline, or a decision you would rather not take on a vendor\u2019s word. Either way you get a straight answer, with the reasoning, within one business day.