ITTech Pulse Exclusive Interview with Jason Pohl Founder & Partner Centric Consulting, LLC

Welcome to ITTech Pulse! We chat with Mr. Jason, a founding partner of Centric Consulting LLC, who leads partnerships, acquisitions, and strategic initiatives to help clients navigate future business and technology challenges.

Hey Jason, before we get start with interview could you please share a brief introduction to yourself, including your key responsibilities at Centric Consulting.

I am a co-founder of Centric Consulting and currently serve as Vice President of Alliance Partnerships, Acquisitions and Strategic Initiatives.  In this role, I help to ensure that Centric is ready and able to assist our clients with the next set of business and technology challenges they will be facing now and into the future.

How do you identify and implement offshore best practices while maintaining alignment with organizational goals and culture?

At Centric, we don’t treat offshore as a bolt-on cost lever — we start by aligning it with business outcomes and with the culture that has been our cornerstone since the beginning. We benchmark what has worked inside and outside Centric, map it to organizational priorities, and test it against non-negotiable cultural expectations like transparency, shared ownership, and delivery excellence. From there we design a global delivery model and governance that hard-wires culture into how work gets done — shared KPIs, visible reporting, onboarding for offshore teams, defined communication cadences, and regular alignment sessions so the offshore team operates as a true extension of the business, not a parallel line.

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We pilot before scaling, track both performance and team health, and keep offshore teams connected to the same feedback and recognition loops as everyone else. That’s how we get the speed and scale benefits without breaking trust or culture.

What milestones helped Centric Consulting evolve into a strategic technology ally over 15 years as a Microsoft Partner?

It wasn’t a single milestone — it has been a deliberate multi-year journey of broadening our Microsoft services and deepening the relationship. Over time we expanded from project-based delivery into the full Microsoft ecosystem — earning all six Solution Partner designations and multiple advanced specializations in areas like Azure Analytics, Data & AI and Modern Work. That expanding breadth created the foundation for being recognized as a Microsoft Managed Partner — a status reserved for fewer than 1% of partners — and positioned us to support clients not just with implementation, but with strategic cloud, AI and modernization outcomes.

How do Centric Consulting’s advanced specializations in Azure Analytics, Data Warehouse Migration, and Dynamics Sales real benefits to clients?

Centric’s advanced specializations provide assurance that goes far beyond credentials. These certifications mean Microsoft has audited our delivery methodology, consistency, and completeness—and found them to be of the highest quality. You’re not just getting developers; you’re getting a partner whose approach has been validated by the platform designers themselves.

What we build will be best-of-breed and follow Microsoft’s own best practices. Our Azure Analytics and Data Warehouse Migration expertise helped Maas Energy Works cut data integration time from weeks to days through proven methodologies that ensure scalability and long-term value. Our Dynamics 365 Sales specialization brings the same rigor, delivering better pipeline visibility, automation, and integration—all using Microsoft-validated methods that reduce risk and ensure solutions built to last. Because we pair technical depth with adoption support, what we deliver drives value—not shelfware.

Cybersecurity is increasingly critical. How does Centric help clients proactively manage cyber risks, and what emerging trends are shaping in this field?

Centric helps clients manage cyber risk by building proactive, business-aligned security programs — not just point controls. That includes security strategy and vCISO services, governance and compliance frameworks, penetration testing and risk assessments to find issues before attackers do, and integration of security into operations so it becomes a repeatable capability rather than a one-time project.

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Emerging trends shaping this work include the shift to virtual CISO models, rising regulatory and audit pressure, more sophisticated attacks across cloud and AI-enabled systems, and the movement of cybersecurity from an IT issue to a board-level business risk. Centric’s approach is built around those realities: making security leadership flexible, embedding security into business decisions, and treating cyber not as an incident response function but as a continuous discipline.

What steps should organizations take to ensure data quality and availability before deploying AI-driven pricing or inventory solutions?

Before deploying AI for pricing or inventory, organizations should:

1. Pilot with purpose. Start with a narrow use case and measurable targets. This is the most critical step—AI is not a time to boil the ocean. Success comes from moving with purpose in bite-sized, consumable, and adoptable chunks. Choose one specific pricing or inventory challenge, define clear success metrics, and execute quickly. The steps that follow should be scoped specifically to support this pilot, not your entire data estate.
2. Inventory and assess data for your pilot. Identify which internal and external data is needed for your specific use case and whether it exists in sufficient quality and volume to support meaningful results.
3. Make pilot data usable and governed. Ensure the data required for your use case is labeled, accessible, secure, and has clear ownership—but only focus on what’s needed for this initial deployment.
4. Clean and standardize for the use case. Align definitions across systems for your pilot (e.g., “available inventory,” “lead time”) and integrate the specific siloed sources needed to avoid noisy inputs that would undermine your results.
5. Set feedback and oversight. Put governance, monitoring, and a re-training loop in place to maintain trust and performance over time as you learn from your pilot.

AI thrives on agile execution. Each use case should drive focused data work, not the other way around. If your pilot succeeds, you’ll have a proven model to expand—with clear lessons about what data capabilities matter most.

What initiatives build Centric Consulting’s AI expertise, and how will it transform client operations?

Centric is customer zero for AI enablement.  We are training every employee in how to leverage AI for the role they are performing internally within Centric and externally for our clients.  We are engaging agentic AI to help Centric run faster and more consistently so that time can instead be spent with clients solving their biggest challenges.  Centric is building AI expertise by expanding a full AI services practice — from strategy and governance to custom agent development and platform integrations (e.g., Microsoft Copilot, Salesforce Einstein).

That investment translates directly into client impact: AI agents and automation reduce manual effort, accelerate decision-making, and improve productivity across functions. Because Centric embeds governance, data readiness, and change management up front, clients avoid “pilot-only” AI and instead deploy AI that is scalable, trusted, and tied to business outcomes — not just experiments.

In what ways do Centric’s six Microsoft partner designations enhance its delivery of cloud and AI solutions?

Our six Microsoft Solution Partner designations strengthen the way we deliver cloud and AI in a few practical ways. First, they show Microsoft has already vetted our capabilities across the full stack — from infrastructure and security to data, AI, and business applications — so clients know they’re getting a partner that can handle the full journey, not just one slice of it. Second, these designations give us closer access to Microsoft resources like funding programs, experts, roadmap visibility, and licensing advantages, which flow directly to our clients. And because the designations span both technology and business layers, we’re set up to deliver AI and cloud work that actually moves the needle — smarter decisions, better productivity, stronger security, and solutions that scale. In short, the designations reduce risk and increase the speed and impact of cloud and AI transformation.

Before we wrap up, what are the five most important points you’d like to highlight about Cloud, AI, Data Warehouse, Analytics, Security?

1) Cloud is now the operating base — not just a hosting choice.
Centric helps clients modernize and migrate so cloud becomes the foundation for speed, resiliency, and scale — and a prerequisite for AI and analytics.

2) AI only works when governed, integrated and tied to business value.
Centric leads with strategy, readiness and responsible adoption — then builds and embeds AI into real workflows so it drives measurable outcomes.

3) Data warehousing is about trust and usability, not just storage.
Fabric, Azure and modern DW patterns are designed to create a single, reliable data backbone that downstream AI, analytics and apps can depend on.

4) Analytics should shorten decision time, not just produce dashboards.
Centric focuses on translating raw data into insight and action — decision intelligence, not more reporting.

5) Security must be built-in, not bolted-on.
Zero-trust principles, identity, monitoring and secure architecture are woven into cloud, data and AI initiatives from the start — protecting the business while enabling innovation.

Thank you, Jason, it was great connecting with you and learning more about your work at Centric Consulting, LLC and your insights in the cyber risk management, cloud solutions domain.

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