About Stratum
Stratum is principal‑led IT advisory.
Twelve years of senior IT leadership, focused on the organizations between owner-led IT and a full-time CIO.
Background.
Stratum IT Services was founded in 2026 by Corey Wininger after twelve-plus years building and running IT functions for organizations in regulated and unregulated industries. The work has spanned infrastructure modernization across Linux, Windows, and hybrid cloud; identity and access programs across Active Directory and modern identity providers; multi-million-dollar budget ownership and executive reporting at the senior leadership level; vendor and MSP management on both sides of the table — as a buyer of managed services and as the operator delivering them.
The pattern across that work: organizations that needed strategic IT leadership but did not yet justify a full-time CIO, or had outgrown owner-led IT and needed a structured hand on the wheel. Stratum exists to be that hand — for SMBs and nonprofits between 10 and 250 employees, delivered on a productized engagement basis instead of an open-ended retainer.
How we work.
Three commitments shape every Stratum engagement. They are not aspirational; they are how engagements are scoped, priced, and delivered.
1. Principal-led delivery.
Corey runs the work end to end. Discovery calls, scoping, delivery, walkthroughs, follow-up Q&A — same person across the engagement. There is no junior delivery analyst the engagement gets handed off to after the SOW signs, and no offshore team filling in the report appendices.
2. Vendor-neutral by design.
No MSP relationship to protect. No preferred-partner kickbacks. No upsell agenda on the back of strategic advice. Recommendations go where the analysis points, not where a referral chain would prefer them to land. The roadmap a Stratum engagement produces is yours, whether you continue working with Stratum afterward or hand it to your team. Stratum is a member of the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program (free base enrollment), which provides directory presence and partner-only training. The relationship provides no commission, rebates, or financial incentives on client Microsoft purchases, and Stratum does not resell Microsoft licensing.
3. Productized engagements over hourly retainers.
Every engagement has a written scope, a defined end date, and a named deliverable in your hands at close. Hourly billing is the exception, not the model. Productized work is repeatable work — and repeatable work is honest work, because the price and the deliverable have been thought through before the conversation, not improvised against a meter.
Why this firm exists.
The mid-market vCIO segment has a tell: most assessments are free, because the assessment is the lead-generation motion for follow-on managed services. That model works well for the MSP. It works less well for the buyer who needs honest analysis of their environment without a recommendation chain that terminates at the MSP's service catalog. Stratum's bet is that the SMB-and-nonprofit segment is willing to pay for honest, productized work — when the alternative is either a free assessment with strings attached, or a six-figure enterprise consulting engagement scoped for a different size of organization.
Stratum is sized for the gap that segment lives in. The engagements are weeks, not months. The deliverables are written, not verbal. The pricing is named on the discovery call, not negotiated. And the principal answering the email is the principal who will deliver the work.
Where we work.
Stratum is based in southern Indiana, with home offices in Bedford and Indianapolis. Engagements run on-site for clients close to home — Bedford, Bloomington, Indianapolis — and remotely for clients across the United States.
Want to talk through whether Stratum is a fit for your organization?