Vertical SAAS Executive Search
ITINERIS
INVESTORS | Cobepa · Alychlo · Societe Federale de Participations et d'Investissement · Smartfin · Gimv · PMV
When you pay your water bill, something has to decide what you owe.
Itineris builds UMAX, the cloud customer information and billing platform that energy and water utilities run on. What makes the company unusual is that it does all three jobs itself: it builds the product on Microsoft Dynamics, implements it, and supports it for the life of the customer relationship. Most of the industry splits that across a vendor and a systems integrator.
Founded in 2003 in Ghent, Belgium, Itineris built a strong position in the North American municipal market and is now expanding into investor-owned utilities.
the engagement
A referral brought 33eleven Partners to Itineris in late 2025, as the company built out its North American organisation for a move into a new market.
Four searches so far, across sales and human resources. Two more are live: Senior Vice President of Product and Senior Vice President of Operations.
PLACEMENTS
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Utility software has one of the longest and most conservative buying cycles in enterprise technology. A municipality replaces its customer information system roughly once a generation, and the seller has to be credible with procurement, IT, and a public commission at once.
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The same profile against different territories and regulatory regimes. Running it alongside the first search gave Itineris one market map to choose from rather than two sequential ones.
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The search that mattered most strategically. Investor-owned utilities are a different buyer: larger, more commercially sophisticated, and evaluating Itineris against SAP and Oracle. This hire had to open a market, not work a territory.
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Itineris runs a delivery organisation of unusual depth, where senior people know the product as well as the engineers do. The mandate covered workforce planning, talent development, and building leadership capability across North America while coordinating with teams in Belgium and India.
Closed in 84 days from a deliberately narrow pipeline of 64 executives.
PARTNERSHIP INSIGHTS
A company entering a new market does not need more of the team it already has.
Itineris built its North American reputation in the municipal market, where its willingness to build, implement, and support UMAX itself is exactly what customers wanted. Investor-owned utilities are a different proposition. They are larger, they run formal competitive processes, and they weigh Itineris against SAP and Oracle.
That is why the four searches were not four versions of the same hire. Two territory sales leaders to deepen the existing business. A VP of IOU Sales to open the new one, which required someone who could sell into a buyer Itineris had not sold to before. And an HR Director, because a company that has always hired slowly and carefully cannot expand into a new market on the same hiring cadence.
Market expansion is an org design problem before it is a sales problem. The companies that struggle are the ones that hire aggressive sellers into a new segment without changing anything else about how they operate.
33eleven Partners places VP through C-suite leaders at Private Equity and Venture-backed SaaS, AI, and technology companies.