This past Tuesday, Commercial Integrator broke significant integration industry news: D-Tools Inc. and Portal.io are merging. The headline takeaways are straightforward. Two of the integration industry’s most widely used software platforms are joining forces. D-Tools CEO G Paul Hess stays on to lead the combined company; meanwhile, Portal.io founder Kirk Chisholm becomes chief product officer over the full portfolio. None of the companies’ products are being discontinued, and no customers will be forced to migrate to a new system.
But in a wide-ranging conversation with Commercial Integrator, Hess and Chisholm went well beyond talking points, describing a partnership years in the making, a quiet catalog integration project already underway and how AI may be poised to unlock opportunities for integrators.
D-Tools and Portal.io: A Partnership Years in the Making
D-Tools and Portal.io have been partners for roughly a decade, dating back to when Portal.io’s managed product catalog was first integrated into D-Tools System Integrator. For Hess and Chisholm, though, the history goes back further than that, starting with a customer support ticket.
Chisholm, who was an integrator himself at the time, recalls trying to troubleshoot an HDMI balun that Hess had a hand in building at Snap AV. “I sent a message, and G Paul responds back from support at like 11 at night,” Chisholm recalls. “And I just could not believe this. [I couldn’t believe] that the chief product guy was responding to support questions. And it stuck with me for years.”
It’s a dedication to service, support and excellence that resonated and that underpins the vision that the two companies now share.
“Why have two separate companies serving the industry, working on two different platforms, when we can bring all this integrator expertise and all this industry subject matter expertise together and deliver a compelling product that serves integrators and the industry?” Hess asks rhetorically.
No Predetermined Destination
In their exclusive interview with Commercial Integrator, both executives were emphatic that the combined product roadmap has not been predetermined. “There is no forced merger or disintegration of product or eliminating a product,” Hess declares. “That’s not planned.”
He underlines that the three-platform lineup of Portal.io, D-Tools Cloud and System Integrator will remain intact to meet dealers’ needs.
Chisholm identifies the greatest current overlap as being between D-Tools Cloud and Portal.io. But rather than dictating a platform that must win out, Chisholm says the combined company will follow customers’ demands.
“The market is going to pull us there,” he says. “The market will be crystal clear on what it wants, and that’s where we’ll go.”
D-Tools and Portal.io: A Catalog Project Already Underway
Chisholm reveals that D-Tools and Portal.io had already been quietly working on merging their product catalogs before the merger was even announced. “We have two teams that have really figured that out, and we’ve actually been secretly working on improving this,” he says, describing work on taxonomy, category structure, deduplication of discontinued items and tighter vendor data integration.
The combined catalog, Hess and Chisholm say, will improve accuracy and specification workflows for all integration industry stakeholders.
An AI Vision Built on Combined Data
Portal.io markets itself as first to market with an AI proposal builder, and Chisholm says the team is already working on its next iteration. “So, for example, for building proposals, we’re already thinking about how to completely redo our builder,” he says.
What excites Kirk Chisholm the most is what the combined company’s data can unlock. Photo courtesy of D-Tools.
Both executives frame all the AI work to come as something very different from chasing after a marketing exercise. “I am in full agreement about resisting this technology-in-search-of-a-problem temptation,” Chisholm says. He summarizes that mindset as How do I take AI and bolt it onto a feature so that I can market that I’ve got more AI? According to Chisholm, “We are going to be way more thoughtful than that.”
What excites Chisholm the most is what the combined company’s data can unlock. “So now, you’ve got two companies that have come together that have a good data set of historical information that’s been aggregated,” he says. “What could that unlock for dealers that Portal couldn’t do on its own and D-Tools couldn’t do on its own?” The idea is to try to leverage AI in a way that almost doesn’t feel like AI is there because it’s working behind the scenes so elegantly.
“Imagine if you could, through our interfaces or in whatever AI interface you’re using now, ask the Portal [and] D-Tools team to build a proposal based on what they know the best practices are, or build drawings, or anything to leverage the data inside those companies,” Chisholm says. “Those are the exciting pieces that we’re going to be able to bring to the industry.”
D-Tools and Portal.io Address the Consolidation Question
Commercial Integrator asked Hess whether D-Tools and Portal.io merging could mean reduced competition, fewer independent options or slower feature development for dealers. He pushed back on the premise.
“When you look at opportunities to bring companies together, there’s lots of reasons,” Hess explains. “They can be strategic reasons. They could be cost synergies reasons. We’re here for the strategy side of it.”
He continues, “There’s no plan that says that there’s a cost initiative or go-get to reduce the costs of [either of the] two companies,” Hess says. Instead, he argues that D-Tools and Portal.io serve similar but distinct customer bases. Hess and Chisholm believe that, over time, they will be better served together.
D-Tools and Portal.io Look to the Future
Asked to speculate on what the average integrator’s software stack will look like three years out, Chisholm predicts a shift toward what he calls a more “agentic” era of software. “You’re going to see a world of agents doing more work that are effectively like digital people that dealers can hire to do fractional or maybe full-time workloads inside of their business,” he predicts.
And make no mistake about D-Tools and Portal.io’s ambitions as a combined entity within the integration channel. Both Hess and Chisholm predict the company will be the default software choice for commercial and residential integrators seeking to run their businesses better.
A Leadership Offsite
G Paul Hess touts the camaraderie, the cultural fit and the good differences of opinion that will power the combined company to new heights. Photo courtesy of D-Tools.
Perhaps the most candid moment of the interview comes when Hess brought up a leadership offsite the two companies held the week before the announcement. “The camaraderie, the cultural fit [and the] good differences of opinion in areas that will be great debate topics in the future,” he enthuses. “It was incredible, and it was really inspiring to see that.”
“When you make a deal to bring companies together, and then you have an event where you spend four long days together in meeting rooms and breaking bread together and see the teams gel and mesh in that way, it’s truly exciting,” Hess adds. “It doesn’t happen often.”
D-Tools and Portal.io on Building Together
Chisholm describes years of D-Tools and Portal.io being positioned as rivals in the market. It’s a framing, he says, that simply doesn’t hold up anymore.
“The more people I meet at the D-Tools team, we realize we are much more like-minded than we think. We’ve just been insulated,” he says.
That framing carries into the messaging both companies plan to bring to CEDIA Expo in Denver next week. D-Tools and Portal.io will exhibit separately at North America’s premier custom integration show, but they’ll introduce a joint leadership team to attendees for the first time.
“You’re going to see the theme at CEDIA Expo,” Chisholm promises. “We say, let’s build together.”
