(This is part of a regular series of technical advisor CEO Spotlights, where leading TAs share their secrets for success and goals for the future).
Gian Verri started Verticle in 2025 to help enterprise businesses navigate and master today’s complex technology landscape. Although Verticle is relatively new in the tech advisor (TA) space, managing partner Verri knew the business well. He has more than 30 years of experience in telecom, cloud, and IT solutions. He was a founder of telecom carrier Granite, helping to grow the business to $2 billion in 22 years with no debt and no outside shareholders.
Verri said while at Granite, “it became clear that organizations need a partner who acts solely in their interest-on their side of table. Verticle exists to fill that gap.”
Verri was among the inaugural Channel Partners TA Thought Leaders named at Channel Partners Conference in April. We caught up with him to discuss Verticle and its role as a technology fiduciary specializing in cost intelligence for Fortune 500 enterprises.
What inspired you to start Verticle, and what is the company’s mission?
Verri: Our mission is to provide deep cost intelligence and fiduciary discipline that helps enterprises control spend, modernize responsibly, and make technology decisions with clarity and confidence.
How big is Verticle headcount-wise, and who are your main technology partners?
Verri: Verticle is a focused team of four managing partners and seven operational experts, growing deliberately and organically. As a technology fiduciary, we provide independent procurement augmentation and deep cost intelligence across telecom, energy, and SaaS/cloud architectures. We do not maintain formal technology partnerships. Our presence at channel events is strictly for independent insight gathering, a learning process allowing us to understand which suppliers may be best positioned to help our customers solve pressing challenges.
Our recommendations remain consistent with our technology fiduciary standards - fully unbiased, solution‑oriented, and aligned with each customer’s unique requirements.
What do you see as the biggest opportunities and challenges in your industry over the next five years?
Verri: One of the bigger opportunities is the continuous demand for independent, fiduciary‑grade cost intelligence that strengthens profit margins, mitigates risk and delivers a lasting competitive advantage to those we serve. AI is revolutionizing everything, except -- so far -- displacing capitalism and removing entirely human intuition. Organizations are under pressure to modernize, consolidate, and justify every dollar and AI is not positioned to do it alone.
Enterprises still depend on trusted advisors who are experienced in consistently delivering audits, recoveries, and diagnostics. As for Verticle in particular, I see a potential cultural challenge to the evolution of our company -- growing pains -- while maintaining the highest quality output, keeping the team aligned to Verticle cultural standards, excited and motivated to ensure the work we perform is rewarding for all involved.
How does Verticle use AI and other emerging technologies to stay ahead of the curve?
Verri: Our focus is on applying AI to accelerate the work that historically required large internal teams, long timelines, and fragmented data. We leverage AI in five core areas – historical cost forensics, contract intelligence, SaaS and cloud sprawl diagnostics, writing SOWs, and scenario modeling. The bottom line is, AI has magnified the speed to market and delivering high impact results to our customers.
What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs or leaders in the tech space?
Verri: Stay focused in one core competency and work your butt off to become known by first name in the industries that have the highest exposure to the problems you solve. Sell the problem you solve, not the product you have. Leverage the witnesses and testimonials to tell your story. Your next 10 customers will be derived from the previous 5 who are willing to testify to who you stand for, your integrity and your character.
Gian Verri
What’s next for Verticle? Are there any exciting projects or initiatives you’d like to share with our audience?
Verri: Our direction and vision are about better serving larger enterprise type customers. The future of meaningful market share in the TSD channel ecosystem within a coveted enterprise customer will be captured through licensing frameworks, not labor. At Verticle, we refer to this new methodology as: Technology Fiduciary Licensing (TFL).
The TFL framework positions Verticle to become a force to be reckoned with by direct sales teams at suppliers in energy, SaaS and telecom. The Verticle TFL is effectively a franchise grade “advisor owned” system without entry fees, without ownership transfer, and fully protected by governance and culture.
What do most people misunderstand about building a sustainable business in the advisor channel?
Verri: The advisor channel is not a sales engine, it’s a trust engine. If you are in a leadership or a founder position, most don’t know what is required to be the leader. Many don’t know what they want. Many don’t know what the end looks like, and they don’t always know what it takes to keep their constituents’ trust and their interest. As a matter of practice, Verticle believes sustainability comes first from its ethos, fostering autonomy, celebrating independence, freedom to act on value, mission and purpose. Independence, discipline, long‑term stewardship, and making a very long-term commitment to long term repeatable value creation, is the gold standard. Verticle is custom designed by sustainable operating systems, automation, standardization, and standard operating procedures. My entrepreneurial foundation was shaped by helping build a major telecom carrier from scratch.
Where do TAs risk losing credibility with buyers today?
Verri: Technology Advisors lose credibility if they start behaving like “sellers.” A fast way to erode trust with buyers today is to blur the line between independent guidance and provider‑driven influence.
If you were starting today, what would you do differently and what would you do exactly the same?
Verri: If I were starting today, I would change little about the principles, but I would change the pace and sequencing. What would I do differently? Codify internal governance procedures earlier - I would formalize decision rights, SOPs, TFL syllabus and partner operating systems from day one to accelerate scale and reduce dependency on any single individual. Delegate sooner - I would empower Managing Partners earlier instead of carrying too much personally in the early stages. Productize cost intelligence faster - I would package our diagnostics, audits, and recoveries into clearer, repeatable modules earlier in the journey. Leverage AI from the start - Instead of layering AI into the practice later, I would build AI‑assisted forensics, contract intelligence, and diagnostics into the foundation from day one.
The principles would remain the same. The difference is that today, I would build the systems earlier so the business becomes scalable, transferable, and multi‑generational even faster.