Accordo Group Hires Channel Vet To Boost Partner Sales

Life-cycle management company Accordo Group just made a big channel play, hiring veteran channel guru Len DiCostanzo as senior vice president and head of business development.

“It’s amazing what I’m seeing. Great technology,” DiCostanzo told CRN about his new job. “I definitely wanted to get into big data and analytics because it’s pretty hot. What Accordo has been doing is taking transaction data and putting it through our data science black box and we’ve got some machine learning and some predictive analytics that can predict a propensity to buy more stuff.”

New Zealand-based Accordo helps companies managed their technology assets. By applying AI tools to the data it collects on customers’ software licenses, the company can track who is due for upgrades, and based on usage patterns, who may be ready to move up the stack, DiCostanzo said.

“We know this customer bought 10 on-prem licenses, but they also have one cloud product,” he said. “So let’s move the rest of the product to the cloud. Based on big data analytics, we can piece together all the data that has occurred due to transactions. We know what they have. We’re able to say, they have a propensity to buy more cloud. They have a propensity to move to another cloud product in the portfolio,” he said.

“We’re looking to engage the partner more because typically the vendor wanted to just touch base with the customer and then get the customer to think about moving, and then the customer would reach out to their partner,” he said. “Now we’re going to the partner first, saying, ‘Hey, partner. We know you’re the partner of record. We’ve seen that you were the person they bought through already.”

DiCostanzo helped to grow the partner community at Autotask by 9,000 prior to the company’s acquisition by Vista Partners and merger with Datto. DiCostanzo—a Brown University graduate with a degree in computer science—was then named senior vice president, channel development at Datto.

DiCostanzo will report directly to Accordo CEO Eric Martorano.

“We are very fortunate to have someone with Len’s experience join our leadership team, creating new opportunities for Accordo as we continue to grow our business and expand into new markets,” Martorano said in a statement. “With 30 years of business development and channel experience in the IT industry, his knowledge around customer success in technology is second to none. I know Len will have an exceptional impact on our business as we continue to strengthen and grow our position in the area of technology life-cycle management.”

Blake Schwank, CEO of Colorado Computer Support, an MSP based in Colorado Springs, said DiCostanzo has tremendous channel credentials. DiCostanzo helped Schwank build his company’s pricing model as well as the bones of his managed services business eight years ago, growing its profitability and his company’s ability to adapt to the changing technology market along the way, he said.

“I think Len is a great fit for any company that wants to move ahead in the channel,” Schwank said. “He has decades of experience. He knows everybody and he really has the ability to build a community and bring people together. He really engages partners, shares knowledge, gets partners to share knowledge with themselves. He’s done a lot for us.”