Customer story:

How IT giant Presidio transformed professional services sales with XaitCPQ 

Presidio generates nearly $6.5 billion in annual gross revenue and delivers some of the world’s most advanced IT solutions. As the company expanded its footprint across the USA, the team recognized that traditional scoping methods could not match the speed and consistency required for their next phase of growth.

Today, XaitCPQ sits at the heart of Presidio’s professional services engine. It hasn’t just cut proposal time in half; it has reshaped how the company sells, delivers, and grows its services business.

Presidio-logo-c-cropped

Region
United States

Company size
3500+

Industry
Information Technology

Solution
XaitCPQ

A technology giant built on constant reinvention

Founded in 2003, Presidio has evolved into a global provider of digital transformation solutions and services across the full technology lifecycle from networking, cloud, security, application development, to automation, and AI. The company is one of Amazon’s largest AWS partners and works closely with major technology players including Cisco, Dell, Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft, ServiceNow and many more.

As the company grew to global scale, so did the complexity of its service portfolio. And while Presidio delivered cutting-edge solutions, some of the tools used to scope and price them lagged behind.

“Historically, like a lot of services companies, we used spreadsheets to figure out what we were going to charge our customer,” says Thomas Lee, Engineering Vice President for Presales Operations at Presidio. “Everything was a bottom-up effort. Our architects would build solutions from scratch every time.”

This approach created challenges familiar to many professional services organizations:

  • Manual & Slow: Proposals were time-consuming and highly manual.
  • Inconsistent: Two architects could design the same project in completely different ways.
  • Variance: Pricing varied widely depending on who built the scope.
  • Burden on Experts: Architects spent too much time writing, documenting, and administering deals instead of interacting with customers.

As Presidio expanded its footprint, the inconsistencies became impossible to ignore. “When you have global customers, lack of standardization becomes a problem,” Lee explains. “One month you sell a project, and the next month the same project looks different.”

About Presidio

Presidio is a major global IT solutions provider helping businesses with digital transformation, focusing on cloud, security, and networking through consulting, design, implementation, and managed services. They act as a systems integrator, partnering with tech leaders like Cisco, Microsoft, and AWS, to build secure, agile digital platforms for clients in various sectors, enabling them to modernize infrastructure, manage data, and enhance cybersecurity. Presidio offers a full lifecycle of support, from strategy to operations, with flexible financing to simplify IT procurement.

“We’ve chopped days off the process,” Lee says. Many proposals can now be turned around the same business day”

– Tom Lee, Engineering Vice President for Presales Operations at Presidio

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A broken model: Selling ‘nuts and bolts’ instead of solutions

Lee uses a vivid analogy to describe the old way of working.

“Imagine walking into a car dealer, and instead of showing you finished cars, they show you a catalog of nuts and bolts,” he says. “That’s the level of detail we were dealing with.”

The highly bespoke nature of Presidio’s scoping process made the sales cycle slow. Senior Solution Architects (SAs), the company's deeply technical experts, had to design the solution, estimate resources, price the project, and write the Statement of Work from scratch.

“It was all very manual and took time away from our highest-paid technical resources,” Lee says.

Presidio needed a new way of working: something faster, more scalable, and more consistent.

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“Xait allows us to work with people with less experience to do the mechanical process of creating the proposal”

– Tom Lee, Engineering Vice President for Presales Operations at Presidio

Evaluating the market, and discovering a gap in CPQ tools

A few years ago Presidio began formally exploring alternatives. They briefly considered building a solution internally but abandoned the idea to keep their developers focused on billable customer work.

The team then thoroughly  evaluated CPQ platforms. Surprisingly, most were ruled out quickly.

“What we found is that many CPQ tools are designed for products, not services,” Lee says. “A product is a quantity and configuration. Services involve resources, people, hours, effort, things most CPQs aren’t built to handle.”

Presidio looked at large, well-known vendors, but found they lacked the specific service-centric logic required. Some smaller niche vendors had potential but were too limited in scale to support a $6.5 billion enterprise.

Why Presidio chose XaitCPQ

The turning point came when the team engaged with Xait.

“When we started talking about services, Xait understood what we were talking about,” Lee says. “They didn’t say, ‘We don’t really do that, but we can tweak the system.’ Instead, they asked, ‘How do you want to solve that?’”

Two key factors set XaitCPQ apart:

  1. A true platform, not just a tool: “What I realized very quickly is that we weren’t just buying a tool; we were buying a platform,” Lee explains. Like Salesforce, XaitCPQ provides out-of-the-box capabilities but allows organizations to tailor the environment to their specific workflows.
  2. Flexibility to grow: Presidio needed a CPQ that could evolve as the business evolved. “The customization capabilities were a major differentiator. I knew our requirements would change,” says Lee.

“XaitCPQ has enabled us to build a standardized service catalog and reduce our response time dramatically”

– Tom Lee, Engineering Vice President for Presales Operations at Presidio

From bottom-up chaos to "Lego blocks"

Implementing XaitCPQ required Presidio to rethink how it packaged its services. The company moved away from crafting every engagement from scratch and toward building standardized offerings. This is what Lee calls “Lego blocks.”

“Every car has wheels, brakes, and a steering wheel,” Lee says. “It’s the same with services. There are common components we can abstract and reuse.”

This shift allowed Presidio to dramatically accelerate sales cycles.

“If you want a penetration test for a thousand hosts? We’ve got that. Boom, done. It’s a five-minute conversation,” Lee says.

Unlocking capacity: A new workforce model

One of the most transformative outcomes came not just from technology, but from how it enabled Presidio to staff their projects.

XaitCPQ enabled the creation of the Pre-Sales Productivity Center. It’s a team of earlier-career resources who now build most proposals.

“Xait allows us to work with people with less experience to do the mechanical process of creating the proposal,” Lee explains.

This allows for a parallel workflow:

  • Senior SAs meet with customers to outline the solution.
  • Productivity Center staff (or offshore teams) assemble the detailed proposal in XaitCPQ.
  • Senior SAs are free to move immediately to the next customer conversation.

“It allows us to centralize proposal creation. Instead of hundreds of architects building proposals, we have a smaller group producing them faster,” Lee says.

The results: Faster proposals, better margins

After two years with what Lee calls “Xait 2.0,” the results speak for themselves:

  • 50–75% faster proposal creation: “We’ve chopped days off the process,” Lee says. Many proposals can now be turned around the same business day.
  • Increased volume: Presidio now generates over 200 scopes every week, an increase of roughly 50%.
  • Margin visibility: For the first time, Presidio can measure profitability at the service level, not just the project level.
  • Competitive pricing: This insight has led to smarter pricing. “One of our practice leaders told me they were lowering the price of some services because we can now see the real margin. It creates a feedback loop that lets us stay competitive,” Lee notes.

Looking ahead: AI as the next evolution

Presidio is already preparing for its next phase with Xait.

“We’re adding AI capabilities into our implementation,” Lee reveals. “Early next year, we’ll have AI assistants helping with configuration right inside XaitCPQ.”

For Presidio, XaitCPQ has become more than a scoping tool. It is a strategic asset that allows them to scale efficiently and maintain a competitive edge.

“It has enabled us to build a standardized service catalog and reduce our response time dramatically,” Lee says. “That’s its biggest advantage.”

 

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