Kennie Rotunda, VP of IT at Loenbro

In this week’s Sage Spotlight, Kennie Rotunda, VP of IT at Loenbro, explains how he’s scaling IT maturity across a fast-growing construction company — with a focus on AI, standardization, and M&A. He also reflects on how painful vendor discovery used to be. In Part 2, he reveals the standout vendors he’s discovered through Sagetap.

Part 1 Video

Part 1 Key Takeaways

• Maturing IT at a High-Growth Construction Company: As Loenbro rapidly expands through acquisitions, Kennie is focused on standardizing systems, reducing technical debt, and driving value through process automation and data strategy.
• AI Needs More Direction and Dialogue: Kennie sees major potential in AI but says the industry is marching toward it blindfolded. His team created an AI Center of Excellence to explore practical use cases and drive smarter adoption.
• Ineffective Vendor Discovery Before Sagetap: Kennie used to struggle to find the right vendors at the right time. He ignored most cold outreach, but when he actively searched, the process was slow, frustrating, and didn’t always lead to the best-fit solutions.

Part 2 Video

Part 2 Key Takeaways

• 75% Less Time on Vendor Research: Kennie uses Sagetap both reactively (when a need arises) and proactively (to stay ahead of emerging technologies). He now finds top-notch vendors 4X faster.
• Solutions Advancing Automation, AI, and Analytics: Among the vendors Kennie has met on Sagetap, he highlights Fixify (AI-powered service desk analytics), Unframe (AI exploration), and Kissflow (process automation) as particularly impressive.
• Sagetap Evolves with Its Users: Kennie appreciates how Sagetap regularly adds new features and diverse vendors — including updates based on his own feedback — making it a tool he returns to consistently.

Full Transcript

Kennie Rotunda: I'm the VP of IT at Loenbro. It's an industrial construction company with a specialty towards electrical for data centers. So, incredibly growing company. Over the last few years, we've doubled and expect to triple over time. 

Coming into Loenbro, my goal was to really mature IT and help mature the business in the process as well: business systems, good business processes, automation, foundational things, as well as data analytics and AI.

Meghan Lafferty: Looking at 2025, and also ahead to 2026, is there something that is most pressing for you and your company?

Kennie: Yes. Right now, we are up to our ears in acquisition work. We're seeing this trend where all these companies are kind of merging together, and I recognize the benefit of having that skill and opportunity as well. We are aiming to get our ERP system migrated together, the domain structure, as well as to continually improve the way we operate within IT. 

In 2026, kind of more of the same, I think. However, much more focus on data analytics, which we already started, as well as AI solutions.

Meghan: Are there major opportunities that lie for vendors right now within the spaces?

Kennie: I think so. Certainly AI opportunities. When we look at AI technologies, there's thousands of AI companies now. 

I really think there's an opportunity for some level of consolidation where you have, perhaps, AI agents or bots or whatever within various systems that are small components and sort of a master, a master bot, if you will, that is reading those. Instead of trying to consolidate all of your data into one lakehouse or warehouse environment and then putting AI over the top of that, which we're currently doing, it could be beneficial as an easy button, if you will, to have AI agents talk to other AI agents. 

So, I think there's a lot of opportunities in this space, a lot of opportunities for vendors to really kind of think differently and kind of make themselves stand out versus blending in with the other AI vendors.

Meghan: Is there something that you wish your industry were talking about more?

Kennie: We're all kind of marching towards AI but have no idea where it's going. So, we're doing this blindfolded, and I think it's silly. Yes, we all want to get there, but we don't know why. So, having that conversation is super important. So, we've created an AI Center of Excellence to start the discussion. It's a small group of people, and we're kind of exploring that space to understand how it's going to help us. 

I think, as well, if we think outside of the obvious AI stuff, I think there needs to be more discussion about the benefits of standardization, especially when you have M&A situations. Standardizing on technologies and processes is incredibly important, making sure you're driving towards that goal. Because technical debt is real, and it costs a lot of money. So, I think it's more about that value realization as you start developing solutions.

Meghan: Let's talk about before Sagetap. How did you identify the right vendors to evaluate before you were on the platform?

Kennie: Incredibly difficult. It's odd. So, in my position, I got business developers from all these different companies trying to get my attention, and probably 98.5% of the time, I'm blocking them from LinkedIn, or I'm not answering my phone call, or I'm blocking the emails because I don't need that product.

Ironically, when I do have a need, who do I contact? Or even if I know who to contact, how do I contact them? I have found so many problems trying to get some attention. Previous to Sagetap, it was an incredibly painful process and time-consuming, and I don't even know if I ended up with the best possible vendor.

Meghan: Why do you now use Sagetap, and what kind of impact has it made?

Kennie: There’s two things: proactive and reactive.

Reactively, if something comes up and I need to do that exploration, I can go into Sagetap and see what players are out there, which vendors are going to be the ones I want to partner up with, and then contact them. It's great. It works great. It's not the first-level person either. You're actually going to talk to somebody that can help you. They have some authority and some flexibility. They know their product a little bit better than a first-level person would at any vendor companies.

Proactively, I like to explore that space and figure out, okay, who's out there these days? What new technologies are there? Because as VP of IT, I need to understand what are the new technologies and who those new vendors? I love the idea of giving new vendors a chance, because they're hungry, they have, perhaps, a brand-new, amazing product. I really like that a lot versus going with some of the big players like Oracle or something like that.

I think overall, using Sagetap as a method of research has saved an incredible amount of time. On the reactive mode, I mean, I cut about 75% of the time I would typically spend trying to find and research vendors within a space. And then just exploring the landscape of new products and vendors, it's hard to quantify that, but where else are you going to go? You're going to do Google searches or something like that? That’s not as effective.

Meghan: So, let's talk about the vendors that you've actually met on the platform. Can you tell me some of the vendors that have impressed you and why?

Kennie: Yeah, there's a few that come to mind. So, one is Unframe.ai, really good AI solution. Another one is Kissflow, which was a process automation tool. That was quite a while ago, but I still remember them, great to work with.

And one that really stands out for me, which is more recent, is a vendor called Fixify. We have a Freshservice help desk system, and our method of getting better information is to really reconfigure it. The way they work is they could apply their AI solution over it, and through effective reporting, it'll automatically generate the categories based on the type of tickets that are coming in and automatically give you the reports you need.

The other thing that was really impressive, and this is the standout piece, they not only give you better analytics out of your system, but they themselves have a connection into that analytics, and they can see how we're progressing, which is great. The benefit there is if you have an overflow, or you need some help with a particular category type or automation, or you just need help desk assigned to it, you can use them as a service, and they have help desk staff. So, it's a perfect overflow. They already have access to our system. They already know our system. They already know our problems and our challenges. So, they just couple in there, and it's a great partnership.

Meghan: It's always cool to hear Sages have similar opinions about some of the great vendors that are on the platform. So, do you have any advice to other leaders who are not on the platform yet but maybe should be?

Kennie: Yeah, get on the platform. It's awesome. I'm not trying to sell this thing, so I'm truly speaking from an honest foundation here. I've been using the product for quite a few years now and love it. It may not be the singular tool you use, but it's an important tool amongst other tools in your toolbox.

One of the things that impressed me the most, and the reason I agreed to do this, is I've found them incredibly proactive in the way they progress their own product.

Throughout the few years, I've been contacted more than a few times to get feedback on what do you think of it, what does it look like? Every time I log in, there's another new feature. And some of the things that I've suggested have come to fruition, which is fantastic.

It's not a product that just sits there, even to the point where they're getting more and more creative vendors in the mix. So, I love the diversity of vendors that are starting to show up within the product.

So, I've been super impressed with it as a company and a product.