IT consulting in Cologne – decisions that still hold up in five years

The initial consultation is free. For a structured IT analysis we usually work at a fixed price that depends on the size and complexity of your IT landscape – so you know in advance what to expect. Ongoing consulting is billed by time spent or as a monthly allowance of hours.

No. We are partners of several vendors – including Microsoft, VMware, Sophos, WatchGuard, Veeam, Acronis, 3CX, Synology and Cisco – but not exclusively tied to any of them. We recommend the solution that fits best technically and commercially, and we disclose any conflicts of interest.

Yes. For companies that do not have, or do not want to appoint, their own head of IT, we take on this role part-time: budget planning, supplier management, project management, reporting to management and regular strategy meetings. The scope is set out in the contract – often one to two days a month.

We advise on the technical implementation: permissions concepts, encryption, logging, deletion policies, data processing agreements with IT service providers and documentation of technical and organisational measures. For the legal assessment and the role of data protection officer, we work with specialised law firms.

For a company with 10 to 50 workstations, we expect two to four weeks from the initial assessment to the finished report. Your own time commitment is usually limited to a kick-off meeting, a few follow-up questions and the joint review of the results.

The analysis and all documents produced from it belong to you. You can use them for a tender, engage another provider or implement them internally. We deliberately do not create dependency – that applies to documentation just as much as to access credentials and licences.

Yes, and that happens more often than you might think. Some companies need a basis for a tender; others have their own IT department and just want a second opinion.

The result belongs to you and can be used without us. We retain no rights to it and do not make handing it over conditional on any follow-up contract – an expert report that is only worth something together with its author is not an expert report.

Yes. We look at the quotes you have received and tell you what is missing, what has been charged twice and where the items are not comparable – for example because one includes licences and the other does not.

We assess the quotes, not the providers. If a competitor has made the better offer, we say so. Our Guides section has a comparison sheet with twelve questions that you can use without us.

We also carry out the implementation afterwards – which is both an advantage and a disadvantage. The advantage: recommendations that cannot be built in practice never come about in the first place. The disadvantage: we are not entirely impartial, because we could earn money from the implementation.

That is why we explicitly do two things. First, consulting can be commissioned and paid for separately. Second, every result states where we could supply things ourselves and where we could not – so you can see where our own interest lies.

Often precisely then. Anyone who looks after an environment every day eventually stops seeing certain things – that is not a criticism, but a well-known limit of perception.

We do not act as auditors of your own people. As a rule, the IT department gains arguments for things it has been asking for for years.

Depending on size, the assessment requires half a day to a full day of access to the systems and one to two hours of conversation with the people who work with them every day – not just with management.

These conversations are the most valuable part. The people at the workstations know better than any report where things get stuck day to day.

On the technical side, yes: what needs to be implemented, in what order, with what effort, and how to provide evidence of it. On the question of whether you are affected, we give an initial assessment – our Guides section has two checking tools for this that you can work through yourself.

What we do not provide: a legally binding determination of whether you are covered, or – for products – the conformity assessment. For that you need a law firm or a notified body respectively. We would rather tell you that beforehand than afterwards.