Salesforce, HubSpot and similar platforms are not our competition. They supply the equipment, much as a commercial kitchen’s ovens and refrigeration do. Value arrives only when someone designs the menu, stocks the pantry and runs the service. In most firms, that work goes to a large consulting practice — a private chef who learns your kitchen from scratch for every client, and charges for the learning.
Datafabric delivers that work as a product. We have spent five years building platforms, data and AI outcomes with Australian asset managers and VC/PE firms, so the industry knowledge is already built — much as a restaurant built around one cuisine already knows its recipes. For small and medium-sized firms, the result is a comparable outcome for far less than a typical consulting engagement.
Two differences.
1. Industry knowledge is reused, not rebuilt. Each engagement starts from a platform that already understands platform files, registries and distribution workflows. You pay for delivery, not discovery.
2. Cost is tied to return. We measure outcomes and report them. In our deployments, distribution teams have reported up to 40% more client meetings with no new headcount, and consolidation work that took days now takes under an hour. A consulting engagement is priced on effort. Ours is priced on a published rate card, with no implementation fee — because there is no implementation project.
The software is rarely the expensive part. The expertise around it is.
The equipment is not the meal
People often ask whether we compete with Salesforce or HubSpot. We do not. We build on them, alongside them and around them. They are excellent platforms, and most of our clients run one.
But a platform is equipment. A CRM licence gives you the capacity to manage relationships, pipelines and campaigns. It does not give you clean adviser data, a mapping of platform flows to the right relationship manager, or a Monday-morning briefing your distribution team will actually open. Someone has to build that.
The vendors know this. IDC’s research for Salesforce forecast that its wider ecosystem would earn $6.19 for every $1 Salesforce itself earns by 2026. Much of that ecosystem is implementation and services: the people who turn the equipment into something useful.
That is the market we compete in. Not the licence. The work around it.
Who runs the kitchen today
For most mid-sized firms, the default answer is a consulting practice. The pattern is familiar: a discovery phase, a set of workshops, a design document, a build, a handover. It is the private-chef model. A capable team arrives, learns your kitchen, cooks for a season and leaves.
The quality can be high. The price reflects the model. Published 2026 Australian benchmarks put large-firm day rates here:
None of these rates is unreasonable for the expertise involved. The issue is what the expertise is spent on. In a typical engagement, a large share of those days goes on learning how your industry works: what a platform file contains, how registries report, why adviser and dealer-group records never quite match. That learning is billed to you, and then it leaves with the team.
Three bills, not one
A firm that buys a platform and engages a consultancy to stock it pays three separate bills. Only one of them is the software.
| Bill | Licence + consulting | Datafabric |
|---|---|---|
| 1. The equipment AI, data and BI platform licences. |
$78,000The US vendor licence lines from our published cost comparison: $8,000 AI platform, $60,000 data platform, $10,000 BI seats.i | Included |
| 2. Stocking the kitchen Discovery, design, build and handover (one-off). |
$440,000A 12-week engagement at mid-point 2026 rates: a partner half a day a week, a director two days a week, a full-time manager and two full-time consultants. About $36,700 a week.i | Included |
| 3. Running it after handover Users, permissions, data quality, feeds and integrations. |
$200,000One administrator, fully loaded: a $150,000 salary plus about 30% on-costs. The same figure as our published cost comparison.i | Included |
| Total, year one | $718,000 | $160,000 |
| Total, following years | $278,000 + any new engagement | $160,000 |
On these assumptions, that is 78% less in year one and 42% less in each year after. The figures are illustrative and the engagement is deliberately modest; we set out the full method, line by line, in our first-year cost comparison.
The second row is the one that matters. It is the largest number on the page, and it is paid for knowledge that already exists elsewhere in the industry.
Why the consulting bill repeats
A private chef is excellent at cooking. But every new household means a new kitchen, new suppliers and new preferences. The chef starts again each time, and each household pays for the start.
Consulting works the same way. The firm may have advised other asset managers, but each engagement is scoped, staffed and priced as a fresh project. The knowledge sits in people and slide decks, not in a working system. When the team rolls off, much of it rolls off too.
This is not a fringe concern. A 2024 Australian Senate committee, after reviewing a decade of federal consulting spend, concluded that the “use of consultants has limited the capability growth” of the public service. Large projects carry their own risk on top: McKinsey and the University of Oxford, studying more than 5,400 IT projects, found that large ones run 45% over budget on average and deliver 56% less value than predicted.
A kitchen built for one cuisine
A restaurant that cooks one cuisine does not rediscover its recipes for every diner. The stock is made, the suppliers are known, and the techniques are refined across thousands of services. Each new table benefits from all the ones before it.
That is the model we have built for Australian asset managers and VC/PE firms over five years. The expensive, industry-specific work is already done and running in production:
- Data feeds from platforms, custodians and registries, consolidated in The Foundry.
- Matching of advisers, dealer groups and platform flows to the right relationships.
- Reporting in Compass, built for distribution and operations teams rather than generic sales dashboards.
- AI in Sherpa, grounded in that data and governed for a regulated business.
Each new client starts from that base. The work we do for you is configuration and the parts genuinely unique to your firm, not discovery of how the industry works.
A consulting engagement
- Starts with discovery of your industry
- Priced on effort: days multiplied by rates
- Delivers a design, a build and a handover
- Knowledge leaves when the team rolls off
- Each change request is a new scope
Datafabric
- Starts from a platform that already knows the industry
- Priced on a published rate card, no implementation fee
- Delivers a running service and measured outcomes
- Knowledge lives in the platform, shared across clients
- Changes ship as part of the service
Cost tied to return
Lower cost is only half the argument. A cheaper project that nobody uses is still wasted money. The other half is whether the spend produces a return you can see.
A consulting engagement is usually measured on delivery: was the scope completed, on time, on budget? Those are reasonable questions, but they are not the business question. The business question is whether your team now does more of the work that wins mandates.
We measure that directly. In our deployments, distribution teams have reported:
Pricing follows the same logic. Every client is priced off the same published rate card: a fixed platform fee for what we run, and variable lines for what you use. The rates do not change from firm to firm; only the counts do. Because adoption and impact are measured on the platform itself, the return is something you can check, not something we assert. We explain how we measure it in The model is rented.
Four questions to ask whoever sets it up
Whether you are speaking to a consultancy, a platform partner or to us, these questions sort the options quickly.
When a consulting firm is the right call
Every vendor article is written by the vendor, so here is where our argument stops.
Board-level strategy, audit and transactions. If you need an independent view for your board, an audit opinion, or advice on a merger or acquisition, engage a consulting or advisory firm. That is their core business. It is not ours.
Large, multi-country transformations. Our case is strongest for small and medium-sized firms, where consulting overheads take the largest share of the budget. A global manager re-platforming across several jurisdictions may well need the scale of a large practice.
Strong internal teams with simple data. If you already employ people with spare capacity and your data sits cleanly inside your CRM, you may need neither a consultancy nor us. We set out where that line falls in our cost comparison, and we would rather say so on the first call than in month six.
And a fair question back at us. Choosing a smaller, specialist supplier carries its own concentration risk. That risk is real, and you should price it and make it a term of the contract rather than take our word for it. Our answer is that the knowledge sits in a platform built to serve every client, not in a few people’s heads — an argument we make in full in Software as a Service is broken.
What does not change: the software is equipment, the expertise is the expensive part, and the best place for that expertise is in a system that keeps running long after the engagement would have ended.
Sources
- Salesforce ecosystem forecast to earn $6.19 for every $1 Salesforce earns by 2026. IDC for Salesforce, September 2021
- Australian consulting day rates by tier and seniority, 2026, excluding GST. Trace Consultants — published by a boutique consultancy as its own market view.
- Senate committee findings on federal consulting spend and public-service capability. The New Daily, June 2024
- Large IT projects run 45% over budget and deliver 56% less value than predicted, from 5,400+ projects. McKinsey & University of Oxford
- Licence, administrator and Datafabric figures, with full method and assumptions. Datafabric first-year cost comparison
- Client meeting and data consolidation outcomes. Datafabric deployments, self-reported
Figures are illustrative and rounded. The consulting engagement is modelled at mid-point 2026 published day rates for a 12-week, five-person team; real engagements vary widely in scope, rates and duration. Licence and administrator figures follow our published cost comparison. Client outcomes are self-reported.