Our story

What the “status quo” means to us and why it’s our purpose to challenge it

by: Renée La Londe

In 2005, I founded iTalent Digital to challenge the status quo and be the type of company that I had tried in vain to find while running large teams at big brands.

While managing multimillion-dollar consulting contracts at companies like Apple, Sun Microsystems, Cisco, and NetApp earlier in my career, I discovered a gap in the market. Either consultancies were too big, charging enormous fees and lacking agility, or they did not provide the depth and breadth of consulting and software development expertise.

I noticed a disappointing and recurring pattern with the world’s biggest consultancies. The experienced and knowledgeable senior consultant that sold us a big idea would soon move on to another client. We would often be left a team of well-intentioned but inexperienced junior consultants that required an enormous amount of guidance and handholding from my team. The heavy lifting ended up falling on us, resulting in many long workdays and inadequate results. This pattern became so predictable, regardless of which major consultancy we worked with, that we began calling it “the status quo.”

Our experience with smaller, specialized consultancies was not much better. Their consultants tended to have more experience and were more hands-on, but their scope was so limited that projects still required significant resources from our team to compensate.

So, I set out to build a consulting firm that brings together the best of both worlds: a full-service consultancy that has the world-class expertise of the biggest consulting firms, with the agility and dynamism of a specialized firm. We built iTalent on the premise that we’d give our clients something different from the “big-four” corporate consulting experience. We would put an experienced team of experts to work in true partnership with our customers, relentlessly deliver what we promised, and provide real outcomes.

We also decided to challenge the status quo through our diversity, and the way we give back. In terms of diversity, we are a woman- and minority-owned consultancy whose unique perspective and approach attracts a robust and diverse talent pool, which is comprised of 54% women and 59% minorities. When it comes to giving back, we are proud to have founded initiatives like GLAM – a leadership development program for girls run by some of the industry’s most prominent women to help young women learn more about the technology industry, meet friends, and feel like they can chart their own destiny. In the U.S. and internationally, we are also proud to continue to sponsor and run initiatives to level the playing field. If you’re interested in learning more, please see our giving back section.

It’s been an amazing journey for us, and it’s not close to being over. Over the past 17 years, we’ve worked with most of world’s major technology companies, built a global presence outside of Silicon Valley, launched a software R&D arm with three groundbreaking SaaS brands in market, and perhaps most importantly, helped make the tech industry more diverse and inclusive through our charitable initiatives. By focusing on our customers and their success, iTalent has been able to differentiate itself from numerous competitors, win an impressive list of Fortune 1000 enterprises as customers, accumulate numerous industry awards, and build world-class technology partnerships along the way.

Today, we still see the same “status quo” creep across our customer and partner community. Consulting companies sell some of the same strategies wrapped as new ideas and deliver mediocre results. Frankly, it’s one of the reasons we remain so motivated to be different, stay true to putting customers at the center of everything we do, and why we continue to expand, grow, and win. Every day, we challenge ourselves to be considerate and fair, and to re-think what great outcomes mean for our people and our customers. This permeates down to how we approach every interaction, on every project, for every client. We are immensely proud of our achievements to date, and hope that everyone who joins us on our journey feels that difference.

Best wishes,

Renée La Londe