We help you buy. No cost.
Requirements, market comparison, negotiation, and activation oversight across seven categories. Compensated by the providers, so the engagement carries no cost to the client and the recommendation is not attached to a quota.
AI
Roughly 80 percent of AI projects never deliver the value they were funded for, and 95 percent of pilots show no measurable return. The difference is decided before the build: the use case, the state of the data, and what it costs at full adoption.
The work covers four decisions: which use cases are worth building, whether your data can support them, how vendors compare when tested on the same material, and what the licensing costs at full adoption.
Key activities
- Use case selection and ranking
- Data readiness review
- Vendor and model evaluation
- Licensing and cost modeling
Cloud Computing
Workloads land wherever they landed first, and the bill grows until someone compares colocation, private cloud, and the hyperscalers directly.
The work is inventory first, then placement, then price. We map what runs where, what it costs fully loaded, and what a move would actually require.
Key activities
- Workload placement review
- Provider comparison
- Cost modeling
- Commitment and exit negotiation
Contact Center, Unified Communications, and Voice Services
When copper retires or a contract renews, phone, contact center, and UC platforms get chosen quickly, usually without a real comparison.
The work covers platform evaluation, POTS replacement, contact center design, and provider negotiation, and it stays through porting and cutover.
Key activities
- Platform evaluation
- POTS line replacement
- Contact center design
- Sourcing, negotiation, and cutover
Network
Bandwidth, sites, and contracts accumulate over a decade, so the network you are paying for stopped matching the one you use.
We start with what exists: every circuit, every contract end date, every site and what it does during the day.
Key activities
- Site and traffic profiling
- Topology and redundancy design
- SD-WAN and SASE evaluation
- Carrier sourcing and negotiation
Security
The tooling is easy to buy and hard to compare, and overlapping products are usually cheaper to consolidate than to renew.
The scope is what you have, what it covers, who operates it, and what is written down.
Key activities
- Risk and gap assessment
- Tooling and coverage review
- Monitoring and response review
- Vendor vetting and sourcing
MSP Services
Choosing a managed provider means judging people and process instead of features, which is where references and scope language decide the outcome.
We work the selection and the contract, not the daily support. That means writing down what the agreement has to cover, running a structured comparison, and reading the final agreement before it is signed.
Key activities
- Scope definition
- Co-managed model design
- Provider comparison
- Contract review and activation
Cost Optimization
Most savings do not require a migration. They come from inventory nobody has reconciled, seats still billed for people who left, and renewals that priced at list because nobody was watching the window.
We start with the full inventory: every circuit, seat, license, and renewal date, with an owner named against each. From there the work covers invoice reconciliation, benchmarking, and a renewal calendar so nothing auto-renews without a deliberate decision.
Key activities
- Inventory and baseline
- Invoice and contract reconciliation
- Benchmark and renegotiation
- Renewal calendar and governance
Same methodology. Every category.
No matter the category, the engagement runs on the same seven-phase process, scoped to the decision at hand.
- 01Discovery & Alignment
- 02Landscape Assessment
- 03Solution Design
- 04Sourcing & Comparison
- 05Negotiation & Selection
- 06Recommendation & Business Case
- 07Activation & Support
The market we compare for you.
Advisory is vendor-neutral, so nothing here is a recommendation. These are the providers that come up most often.
Product and company names are the trademarks of their respective owners.
The first conversation is a scoping call, not a pitch.
We ask what you have, what is expiring, and what is not working, then tell you whether there is work here worth doing. If Elk Run is not the right fit for the decision in front of you, we will say so.