Our Story
IQ4hire pioneered vendor-neutral enterprise IT procurement before the term existed. The methodology that delivered $600M+ in documented savings is back — rebuilt for 486 vendors, 17 categories, and a market far more complex than the one we started in.
The Founding
IQ4hire was founded in Chicago by Brian Sommer, a former Andersen Consulting partner, and co-founder Vinnie Mirchandani, a former Gartner Group analyst. Together, they built something the market hadn't seen before — not a staffing board, not a bid auction, but a structured, human-guided process for matching enterprise buyers with the right technology firms.
The company officially launched in July 2000, backed by marquee investors including Oracle President Ray Lane and PeopleSoft founder David Duffield. Its first funding round closed at $3.5 million.
At 43 employees, IQ4hire operated a "trading pit" — a team of exchange directors who worked directly with buyers to develop and sharpen their requests for service before any vendor ever saw them. The result was an apples-to-apples comparison that traditional RFP processes, often costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, routinely failed to deliver.
By 2000, the consulting market had fragmented dramatically. The Big Five dominance of the 1990s had given way to dozens of boutique e-business firms — iXL, Proxicom, Razorfish, Scient, Sapient, Xpedior — leaving enterprise CIOs without a clear framework for evaluation.
"CIOs want to be able to tell the board why they're using a particular consultant — and they want that information to come from an independent source."— Brian Sommer, CEO · IQ4hire · CIO Magazine, October 2000
Buyers paid approximately 4% of project value for completed engagements. Consulting firms paid a matching fee plus an annual subscription. IBM Global Services, Computer Sciences Corp., and Clarkston-Potomac Group were among the first firms to participate.
Press Coverage · 2000
"We were never very good at the formal process of sending out an RFP. I saw this as a way to shortcut the whole process. The responses that came back were in a consistent format. It was easy to do an apples-to-apples comparison."— Chris Paul, SVP of MIS, Oakwood Homes Corp. · CIO Magazine, October 2000
Founding Team · 2000
Original Advisory Board · July 2000
Track Record · 2001–2005
IQ4hire's engagements validated the methodology at the highest levels of enterprise complexity. As Senior Advisor from 2001, David LaRue led or played a central role across the firm's most consequential procurement work.
At Hartford Insurance, LaRue directed legacy systems outsourcing — one of the most complex categories of IT procurement, where vendor selection decisions carry decade-long consequences.
At JP Morgan Chase, he led the enterprise procurement process across one of the largest and most demanding financial services environments of the era.
The McDonald's engagements became the landmark proof of the methodology — a multi-year, multi-workstream program spanning data center outsourcing, global communications, ERP, and POS modernization across 30,000+ locations in 121 countries. The structured IQ4hire selection process produced documented savings that defined the firm's track record for a generation.
Today
The insight that launched IQ4hire in 2000 has only grown more urgent. The technology landscape that overwhelmed CIOs in the dot-com era — a handful of dominant firms replaced by dozens of boutique specialists — now looks quaint beside a market of 486 vendors across 17 categories, where every category has undergone its own fragmentation.
What a CIO needed in 2000 was an independent, rigorous, documented rationale for their technology decision. What a CIO, CFO, or board needs in 2026 is exactly the same — applied simultaneously to cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, UCaaS, AI tooling, connectivity, and Microsoft licensing. The complexity has multiplied. The core problem has not changed.
The methodology built at IQ4hire in Chicago — the structured evaluation, the apples-to-apples scoring, the defensible recommendation — was never a product of its moment. It was always the answer to a permanent problem. That is why it is back.
Start with an IT spend diagnostic. 30 minutes. No commitment, no vendor agenda — the same independent approach that has guided $600M+ in enterprise procurement.
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