Built for the buyer's side of the table.
Avèro is an independent advisory firm representing public agencies through ERP selection, implementation, and AI modernization. Senior-led delivery, vendor-neutral by structure, public-sector exclusive by choice.
Avèro was founded on a principle that sounds simple but is remarkably rare in consulting. The people advising an agency on its technology decisions should have no financial relationship with the vendors competing for its business.
AV spent the better part of a decade inside large government technology advisory firms, long enough to see why the model breaks. Referral fees from vendors. Partner commissions from resellers. Sponsored research from the platforms being evaluated. The incentives tilt quietly, and the agency's outcome takes the worse end of the trade.
Avèro was built, deliberately, so our only incentive is the agency's outcome. We hold no software contracts, take no referral fees, and carry no reseller relationships with Tyler, Workday, SAP, Oracle, Infor, or any other vendor a public agency might evaluate. The firm has never renegotiated that posture and never will.
That structural independence is why we can tell a client when the demo they just saw is rehearsed, when the proposal is undervalued, and when the incumbent vendor's roadmap costs more than it needs to. It is also why forty-plus agencies have been willing to let us sit next to them for years at a time.
Six rules. Zero exceptions.
These aren't marketing positioning. They're structural constraints on how the firm works. The things we would rather lose an engagement over than compromise. If any of these feel like friction, we're likely not the right fit, and that's useful to know early.
No vendor money. No implementer role.
No referral fees, reseller margins, partner commissions, or sponsored research. We represent the agency through the process. We don't configure the software or build the integrations. The separation is what keeps incentives clean.
Public sector exclusively.
We take no commercial engagements, so nothing splits our attention. Every framework, every benchmark, every contract clause is built around how government actually buys and operates.
Senior people do senior work.
The team briefing your CAO is the team doing the analysis. Senior-weighted by design. Pyramid staffing belongs to firms with different economics.
FOIA-survivable by default.
Every recommendation is traceable to a source, defensible under scrutiny, and written for audiences who may never meet us. You'll never see black-box scoring or "because it feels right."
Capability, not dependency.
Every engagement should leave the agency more capable than it found it. Our job is to upskill staff into informed buyers, not to make the agency need us forever.
Say the hard thing early.
If Phase Zero tells us you aren't ready to procure, we say so. If an implementation is off-track, the next board update reflects it. Nobody is served by sanitized status reporting.
Senior people. No pyramid.
Senior-led by design. You won't find junior associates running client calls or an offshore delivery model. The people briefing your executive team are the people doing the work.
Abhijit Verekar
Abhijit ("AV") founded Avèro to fix what traditional consulting gets structurally wrong. The quiet financial ties between advisors and the vendors they're meant to be evaluating. Before Avèro, he spent the better part of a decade inside large government technology advisory firms, long enough to know why the model breaks and where it can be fixed.
He has led ERP, data, and AI modernization engagements for counties, cities, utilities, airports, and special districts across the country. He is the author of Start at Zero (2026), the playbook Avèro's methodology is built on, and host of Start at Zero with AV on YouTube. He writes the Untangled newsletter on LinkedIn for public-sector technology leaders and publishes the annual Start at Zero AI Navigator tool assessment.
AV is based in Knoxville, Tennessee, where Avèro is headquartered at Riverview Tower. Avèro is a certified Minority Business Enterprise (Tennessee MBE #10311804) and a six-time Inc. 5000 honoree.
Who you'll actually work with.
A sample of the bench, not all of it. Senior throughout, with no layer of junior staff between the person who scoped your engagement and the person running it.
Robert Kornovich
More than two decades inside local-government technology, including seventeen years running municipal IT, before crossing to the buyer's side of the table. The experience an agency's own IT director recognizes on sight.
April Romines
Oversees operations, delivery governance, and organizational management across the firm. The operational backbone that lets a senior-led advisory practice scale without diluting the quality of the work.
Kerry Boudreaux
Leads growth across the firm. A career built in the public-sector enterprise software market, and the standing relationships with finance officers and CIOs to show for it. Agencies know him; vendors respect him; both take the call.
Katie Connatser
Leads finance, HR, marketing, and internal operations. Runs the rhythm of the firm: publishing, scheduling, design, and the hundred small things that keep an advisory practice professional and on time.
Manish Kanjipuram
Leads Avèro’s Global Innovations Center in Hyderabad — the engineering and delivery capability behind the products and the platforms clients see, from Caliber to the research and tooling that support an engagement.
Mike Cole
A retired police commander with more than three decades across multiple departments, most of it at Paradise Valley PD, where he rose to Acting Chief and ran the RFPs and multi-million-dollar public safety technology procurements from the buyer’s side. A General Instructor at Arizona POST, and Avèro’s public safety technology expert on the Knoxville Police Department engagement.
Sara Roser
Nearly two decades leading large-scale technology implementations and organizational transformation for public-sector and Fortune 500 clients. Deep in the part most projects underestimate: stakeholder engagement, risk, governance, and bridging what the business needs to what the technology can actually do.
Cary Tapscott
A Business Administration degree and an MBA in Strategic Leadership from the University of Tennessee, and a career across legal e-discovery and healthcare running large-scale project management, data privacy, and technology change — work that saved those firms millions through the policy and system decisions he drove.
Klay Brooks
A Prosci-certified change management practitioner who leads Avèro’s work on responsible AI adoption in the public sector. Comes to business analysis and process improvement from cultural anthropology — a useful place to start when the question is what people actually do rather than what the manual says, and a sharp lens for putting AI to work without breaking how an agency operates.
Anita Duffaut
PMP, CSM, and CSPO, with nineteen years of program management behind her — PMO build-outs and enterprise change at IBM, Disney, NBC Universal, and Toyota. Runs programs rather than single projects: several workstreams at once, one schedule holding them, and the dependencies that decide whether a modernization lands when it was promised.
Lewis Colon
PMP and PROSCI-certified, and back in the public sector where he started — the Mayor's Office of Economic Development in Denver — after running a $40–60M capital and operations portfolio at Portland General Electric and a global PMO at Rockwell Automation.
Patrick McVerry
A Master of Management from George Mason, and system assessments, IT strategic plans, and full technology selections run across municipalities, housing authorities, school districts, and water districts. Focused on aligning technology with what an organization is actually trying to accomplish before anything is bought.
Billie Jo Norton
PMP and Six Sigma Black Belt, with a Master of Arts in Education, and over a decade delivering ERP and SaaS modernization in the public sector. At Avèro she has led enterprise optimization across Public Services, Land Development, Civil Engineering, and Transportation, and builds the internal delivery frameworks the rest of the bench runs on.
Nick Costanzo
Avèro’s HCM and HRIS specialist. Runs delivery across discovery, evaluation, and implementation oversight, with the depth in human-capital and payroll systems to know where those selections usually go wrong before they do.
Lynn Youngman
More than ten years leading software, data, and SaaS implementations, the last five focused on the public sector: fast-tracked system assessments, enterprise strategic planning, and end-to-end selection. A Boston College degree double-majoring in Mathematics & Computer Science and Secondary Education.
Richard McCord
Manages engagements through the phases where programs usually slip: requirements sign-off, vendor demonstrations, and the gates between contract and go-live.
Kim Cawley
Avèro’s finance ERP specialist. Runs modernization engagements from assessment through implementation, holding the plan, the risks, and the evidence trail together, with the financials expertise to keep a general-ledger conversion honest.
Jeremy Seeders
A business-analytics and programming background — Python, SQL, and BI tools — put to work on public-sector ERP and HRIS discovery, selection, and implementation, plus IT governance and data migration. An MBA from Lincoln Memorial and a summa cum laude Business Analytics degree from Maryville College.
Joe Trietsch
Eighteen years running enterprise IT programs, most recently at UC Riverside: SaaS and financial system implementations, a cloud migration that retired two data centers, and telephony across ten thousand extensions.
Not a pitch deck. The paperwork.
The things an agency procurement office cares about. Filed, certified, and publicly verifiable.
TN MBE #10311804
Tennessee certified Minority Business Enterprise. Qualifying supplier status for state and local government procurement.
Six-Time Inc. 5000 Honoree
Named six times to the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in America. A measure of sustained growth rather than a single good year.
National purchasing access
TXShare, Port of Portland, NY Edge, and the State of Oklahoma. Agencies can contract through an existing competitively-awarded vehicle rather than running a new solicitation.
Riverview Tower, Knoxville
Tennessee-based. Same-day site availability across TN, KY, NC, VA, SC, GA, AL. National engagement footprint.
Start at Zero (2026)
Published methodology for high-stakes government modernization. Companion to the Untangled newsletter and YouTube channel.
Come meet the team.
If the principles on this page resonate, the next step is a thirty-minute briefing: a conversation, without a pitch deck, about what you're working through and whether Avèro is the right fit for it.