Technology Partners built an IT business by showing its cut

At Infoplus, the trouble arrived before the new features did. The warehouse-software company had a disrupted development team, shifting goals, and work that had stopped moving. It needed engineers. It also needed direction. Technology Partners supplied a multidisciplinary rescue team and helped find a chief operating officer. The assignment crossed a boundary that most purchasing departments would put into separate boxes.

That boundary is where this company becomes interesting. Technology Partners has a name so admirably unshowy that it could disappear into a procurement spreadsheet. Its business, however, rests on an opinion: the person doing the work, the economics of employing that person, and the organization directing the work belong in the same conversation.

01 / The invoice was the opening argument

Greg and Lisa Nichols founded Technology Partners in 1994. Greg had been an IT consultant; Lisa brought sales experience. A company-posted account of their beginnings describes Greg developing software as a side project and asking Lisa to help sell it. The enduring business became IT staffing, with a particular commercial promise: a low, fixed margin made transparent to the parties involved.

The distinction is easy to miss because “transparency” has become the business equivalent of parsley: sprinkled over everything. Here, it refers to the money. Technology Partners presents its staffing model as a way to give clients better value while allowing consultants higher compensation and greater control over their careers. The intermediary still has a business to run. Its argument is that the terms should be visible.

“We built this company with three things in mind: high pay, interesting work, and work/life flexibility.”

Greg Nichols · 2020

There is a practical idea inside that pitch. Buying technical labor involves two constituencies with different anxieties. The employer wants someone who can deliver. The consultant wants worthwhile work and a fair deal. A recruiting firm has to satisfy both, repeatedly. A beautifully presented candidate is of limited comfort if the arrangement gives that person every reason to leave.

By 2020, the company was reporting a regional milestone: the St. Louis Business Journal had ranked it the area’s largest temporary staffing firm, using local temporary-placement revenue from 2018. That is a precisely bounded achievement. It establishes a substantial regional staffing business, rather than a claim to dominate every sort of technology consulting.

02 / A vacant chair and a stalled project

Recruitment remained part of the business, but the brief widened. The Solutions Group dates to 2011, according to the public biography of founding member Matt Nicolls. Today, customers can engage Technology Partners for specialized talent, embedded delivery teams, custom applications, systems integration, cloud work, and AI enablement. Leadership advice and development sit alongside those services.

Infoplus makes that combination tangible. Technology Partners’ case study describes engineers and an experienced operational executive working on a troubled project, clarifying requirements and integrating with the existing team. The reported results include five major features, 32 customer enhancements, lower AWS spending, and better platform performance. The company also describes placing a COO.

Maureen Johnson, Infoplus’s director of product development, singled out integration with its people and culture as the biggest value. That is a revealing preference. Buyers may come looking for technical expertise and end up caring intensely about how that expertise behaves when it joins their organization.

For a prospective customer, the distinction between these offers matters. A specialist can fill an identified gap. An embedded team can supply delivery capacity. A broader consulting engagement can address architecture and execution. If the work lacks an owner or its goals keep changing, simply adding more developers leaves those decisions unresolved. The Infoplus story suggests why a company able to recruit executives as well as engineers might have an advantage in that particular situation.

03 / AI begins with the plumbing

The data business extends the same habit of looking beneath the advertised problem. An organization may ask for artificial intelligence when its immediate obstacle is that useful information sits in separate systems, arrives inconsistently, or carries restrictions that nobody has resolved. A model cannot make those organizational questions disappear.

Technology Partners’ cloud and data practice has worked with Microsoft and Databricks. In February 2025, it announced the public emergence of Databasin, a data integration and automation platform developed within that practice. The launch announcement named Washington University in St. Louis as a collaborator in development and testing, and said the platform was available through Azure Marketplace.

This is a different commercial proposition from selling consulting hours. Databasin’s current website offers a managed cloud service and a private deployment inside a customer’s Azure tenant. It describes data connections, governed questions in plain English, and automated workflows. Buyers get a product to evaluate, with deployment choices that make ownership and control part of the purchase.

Its published cloud pricing also provides an unusually concrete answer to the cost question. As checked in October 2026, pipeline and automation runtime are each listed at $5 per hour; compute, storage, and AI tokens carry additional meters. New accounts receive $50 in credit. Private Azure deployments use a separate module-licensing model. The sensible comparison is the complete bill for the workload, including the resources it consumes.

04 / Leadership gets its own seat

Another expansion came in December 2024, when Technology Partners and Ouellette & Associates announced they were joining forces. The announcement identifies O&A as a division of Technology Partners and describes an existing collaboration through the Technology Leadership Experience, or TechLX. Training was already part of the relationship before the organizations formalized the union.

O&A’s Bowdoin College case study offers a different kind of turnaround. The college’s IT organization had fragmented teams and inconsistent service. Its CIO led a restructuring; O&A provided service-excellence training. Clearer responsibilities, cross-functional meetings, and earlier involvement in campus decisions accompanied the work. The published account reports approval ratings rising from 10% to 95% over two years.

The college’s leadership deserves its place in that sentence. Training was one component of a larger change. The transferable idea is to pair development with changes in how work happens. Employees asked to collaborate need shared routines and authority to match. A workshop followed by precisely the same incentives and reporting lines has a considerably harder job.

Lisa Nichols’s public work gives this interest a personal face. She began the Something Extra podcast in 2018 and released a leadership book in September 2025. Inside the company, the LIFT initiative - Lives Impacted, Futures Transformed - focuses on basic needs, education, and economic development. These activities sit comfortably beside a business that depends on people choosing to work with it.

05 / Buy the diagnosis before the extra hands

Technology Partners serves organizations nationally, with a history of clients in financial services, healthcare, and agriculture, and a current offer spanning additional industries. Its alternatives include broad IT services firms such as TEKsystems Global Services and Everforth Apex, as well as separate specialist recruiters and development consultancies. Many firms can write software or find candidates. Technology Partners’ case rests on connecting that work to leadership and team fit.

There are encouraging customer signals. In February 2026, the company announced a ClearlyRated client Net Promoter Score of 100. Its April announcement marked a 14th consecutive year of Best of Staffing recognition. Satisfaction measures help frame a buying decision; the proposed team, scope, and commercial terms still need their own scrutiny.

The reader can borrow three habits without signing a contract. Ask how the staffing economics work. Identify whether the shortage is expertise, capacity, or direction. Then agree who owns the decisions between those categories. A narrow, well-managed vacancy may need only a good recruiter. A project like Infoplus’s may need someone willing to notice the empty executive chair as well as the unfinished code.