For private equity portfolio companies, sequenced to your hold period.
Re-architecture in chunks rather than rewrites. AWS funding (MAP Lite, MAP, OLA) applied to discovery and migration phases where eligible. Engagement model that fits your portfolio company governance and operating partner reviews.
This page is for operating partners and portfolio company CTOs evaluating AWS partners. We've worked on engagements where PE was the ownership context: Janes (Montagu-owned during the engagement) and UK Tote Group (PE-owned during the engagement period before its £115 million sale). We don't yet have a published PE-themed case study; the pattern below is drawn from those engagements plus our broader mid-market UK book of work.
If the fit is right, a PE-specific case study will follow. For now the page is honest with you that the proof set is portfolio-company-shaped work without an explicit PE-themed write-up.
PE portfolio companies under value-creation pressure face a recognisable set of tensions.
Multi-year monolithic transformations don't fit; equally, no work at all leaves the technology debt to compound through to exit. The right question is what to do in the next twelve to eighteen months that earns its place in your value plan.
The numbers that will sit in your diligence pack need to be defensible and produced cleanly. The platform decisions you make now show up in the diligence room later.
Large global system integrators set out engagement shapes built for the enterprise rather than for portfolio companies. Smaller boutique firms can sometimes deliver pace but lack the AWS depth. The middle ground you need is narrower than it should be.
Work for a portfolio company is sequenced to your hold period rather than to a generic three-year roadmap. The unit of work is the next six to twelve months of investment that earns its place in your value plan, with each piece chosen to either reduce ongoing cost, lift commercial agility, or strengthen the platform for exit.
Re-architecture in chunks beats rewrites. A full platform rewrite is rarely the right answer in your hold period; a sequence of well-scoped re-architecture pieces, each releasable, usually is.
Honest views are part of the value for you. "Wait" is on the table when the work doesn't earn its place in your value plan, alongside the "yes, this is the right next investment" recommendation. Portfolio company decisions get better when the consulting partner is honest about both.
Engagements scoped against your hold period and your value plan rather than against a generic three-year roadmap. Each piece of work earns its place against either operating cost, commercial agility, or exit readiness.
Sequential, releasable pieces of re-architecture rather than a multi-month full rewrite. Lower delivery risk, faster value, easier to slot into your operating partner review cycle.
AWS Migration Acceleration Program funding applied to discovery and assess phases where eligible. Reduces your upfront investment so the portfolio company can validate the approach before committing further.
Our recommendations are independent of our interest in selling you further engagement. Where the work doesn't earn its place in your value plan, we say so, and the conversation stops there.
Most engagements begin with a short scoping conversation that includes your portfolio CTO and, where relevant, the operating partner. The aim is to get to the right shape of work in the right time horizon: a Funded Data Strategy Diagnostic if the data and AI plan is unclear, an AWS-funded migration assessment if the platform decision is the next move, or a paid scoping engagement if the work is well-defined and needs delivery design.
Delivery cadence matches your portfolio governance: monthly reviews, quarterly value-plan check-ins, an engagement that can be paused at any review point without leaving the platform half-built.
Montagu-owned during the engagement
Janes commissioned D55 to re-architect a monolithic data ingestion platform that ran on a single Windows server. The rebuild used AWS Lambda, Step Functions, and EventBridge to create a serverless, massively parallel architecture. Processing time fell by 99.9 per cent (from twelve hours to under two minutes), and the platform now supports 35 times more data sources. The work freed analysts to spend their time on analysis rather than aggregation.
PE-owned during the engagement period before the £115 million sale
UK Tote Group commissioned D55 to migrate from Google Cloud Platform to AWS and to modernise core services into C# microservices on Amazon EKS, with DynamoDB and Redis replacing the SQL Server estate where the access pattern was key-value. The patterns we established continue to be used by the Tote team for each new microservice they add.
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