Ottotell exists because too many technology decisions get made by whoever has the strongest incentive to sell you something. We wanted to build the other thing: senior people, paid the same whichever way the answer lands.
Everyone who has worked inside a business long enough has watched the same thing happen. A problem gets noticed. Someone calls a vendor. The vendor — reasonably, from where they sit — proposes their product. Six figures and eight months later the original problem is still there, now with a subscription attached.
It is rarely anyone’s fault. It is a structural issue: almost every party in that conversation is paid more when more is bought. The organizations that avoid it are the ones with someone senior and genuinely independent in the room early — before the shortlist, before the demo, while the question is still “what are we actually trying to fix?”
Most small and mid-sized organizations cannot justify that person full-time. So they go without, and pay for it later. Ottotell is the attempt to make that judgment available by the week and by the month instead of by the salary.
We are a small senior team — [[YEARS]]+ years each of building, integrating and running business systems, on both the in-house and the consulting side. We are strongest in IT and applied AI, and deliberately not bound to either. A good share of our work ends in a process change, a renegotiated contract, or a conversation between two departments that had never had one.
We are not a managed service provider, and we do not want your helpdesk. We are not a software agency looking for a build. We are not a large consultancy that sells with partners and delivers with graduates. And we are not an AI shop — AI is one instrument among several, and it is the right one less often than the current market noise suggests.
The practice
Experience
Client work is confidential and we do not publish names without written permission. What we can tell you is the shape of the experience behind the advice.
Where we sit
Each of these is a legitimate business doing a real job. The trouble starts when one of them is asked to do a job it is not structured for.
Keeps the lights on: support, patching, hardware, uptime. Excellent at operations. Rarely independent when the question is which platform you should buy, because they usually sell or support the answer.
We work alongside yours, not instead of it.
Builds what you specify, often very well. But the business model rewards building, so “you should not build this” is a difficult sentence for an agency to say out loud.
We ask whether to build before asking what to build.
Real depth and real methodology, at a scale that suits large enterprises. Sold by partners, delivered by teams you did not meet, and priced for organizations with a procurement department.
Same rigor, senior delivery, without the overhead.
The right answer eventually. But a senior technology leader is expensive, slow to find, and hard to assess if you are not technical yourself.
We bridge the gap — and help you hire when it is time.
The short version
A consultancy that measures itself by billable hours will always drift toward longer engagements. We try to measure ourselves by whether the client could function without us — which is an awkward metric to build a business on, and the only one we think is honest.
In practice that means short phases, written recommendations you own, standard technology, real handovers, and a willingness to end an engagement early when the work is done. Our best clients come back years later for the next decision. That is the business we are trying to build.
Bring it to us before the shortlist, not after. Thirty minutes, no charge, and no obligation to go further.