Bridging the gap between real-world business strategy and technical architecture.

• In depth technical reviews
• IP defensibility
• Roadmap validation
• Recommendations for course correction

SeedCloud, positioned as technology mentors, take a very different approach to technology due diligence.

Advising major PE/VC clients and large software and tech companies, our work is designed to support key investment thesis areas, and align directly with the commercial drivers. Rather than deploying checklists and formulaic approaches, we work to get under the skin of the underlying business strategy; assessing the tech platform in the light of market trends, integrations, threats and opportunities.

We help companies combine the technology, product positioning and strategy that leverages their unique strength - delivering robust, informed, and above all, actionable insights; often leading to ongoing engagements where we provide mentoring, market insight and advice.

Helping define product strategy and positioning in a crowded market-place.

• Product capability
• Core IP and defensibility
• Market suitability
• Messaging and communication

The positioning and messaging of a product is key to success in an increasingly competitive market. SeedCloud helps companies combine the technology, product positioning and strategy that leverages their unique strength.

Our market reviews deliver a clear map of where a company should compete, and where to integrate and leverage the strength of third parties. Our approach looks at the personas of adoption, and creates a focused product messaging strategy.

Integrating business strategy and best practice into an achievable technology roadmap.

• Architecture design
• Technology selection strategy
• Design patterns & frameworks
• Core algorithm design
• Creation & validation of a technology roadmap

We lead 2-3 year architecture transformation projects that transition a technology stack to modern best practice, with increased delivery cadence of new features.

Our extensive technology due diligence experience provides a clear pattern of emergent best practice. Blending this with our involvement across a wide range of industry sectors and verticals, we create forward looking roadmaps and architectural frameworks that combine core business strategy with the flexibility to adapt to changing markets.

Preparing a technology architecture to take advantage of a global cloud strategy.

• Cloud provider selection
• SaaS/PaaS technology selection
• Readiness review and migration planning
• Cloud infrastructure
• Regional data privacy design
• Hybrid cloud strategies

Migration to a cloud platform requires that architectural and deployment practices are effectively cloud-enabled - in order to avoid simply becoming an expensive data centre.

Complex and growing regional data privacy and jurisdictional regulations also require careful design of any globally growing platform. Multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud strategies are emerging fast, and SeedCloud consistently lead thinking in this area.

Culture and process are key to the success of any technology project. SeedCloud provides a Maturity Framework to measure tangible progress in:

• Agile practices
• Quality assurance
• Product ownership
• Development and engineering practice
• Environments & deployment

SeedCloud has developed a series of tools that measure the cultural shifts to make transformative changes to technology within an organisation. The result is a tangible CTO, board and investor framework to measure progress in these areas. Meaningful tools are put in place for continuous iteration, feedback and assessment.

The ongoing assessment covers the end to end development lifecyle, from purpose and culture, to artifacts, practices, processes, metrics and tooling.

Bringing significant market experience in building an efficient and clear team structure.

• Roles and structure
• Team composition and shape
• Recruitment for key roles
• Mentoring and personal growth

Developing a technology team is becoming increasingly difficult. Competition, rising salaries and the inability to measure real technical ability are only part of the issue.

Attracting a strong team is based on a key mixture of culture, market acceptance of roles, team shape, and the overall message that the engineering function projects into the market.

SeedCloud bring vast experience in this area, with well proven techniques and wide market network connectivity.

Mapping business drivers into analytics insights.

• Data warehouse architecture
• Business insights
• Frameworks for data science,
   machine learning and AI integration
• Stakeholder integration across marketing,
   finance and other areas
• Visualisation and collaboration – using
   data to unify business stakeholders

SeedCloud has decades of experience in analytics architecture than has spanned investment banking, high frequency trading and large scale eCommerce and SaaS platforms. We lead due diligence across products in the analytics space, and are well placed to advise on best practices, data architecture and selection of tools.

Driving security awareness into core technology culture.

• Security policies and security culture change
• Application penetration testing
• Security-driven code and architecture review
• Integration of security into SDLC process
• Executive and board awareness

Technology platforms are receiving constant attention from the hacker community. Platforms are vulnerable to threats to reputation, data privacy, platform stability and customer trust.

Security reviews normally look solely at the tooling and third party reviews of vulnerability. SeedCloud recognises that the vast majority of vulnerability actually lies in the processes and people that build and deploy the technology, and those that manage the data and provide support. Our security review process brings these areas together into a comprehensive framework.

Applying strong, sustainable legal frameworks to the software portfolio.

• Identification of core IP
• Areas of defensibility
• Multi-country patent strategy
• Licensing coverage

Backed by a team with global experience in software patent protection, we review the legal foundation of software in conjunction with the strategy of the business, addressing licensing, risk and protection.

Core to our work is the identification of core and non-core IP, and blending that into product strategy; together with the exploitation of opportunity through global patent strategy, open source and licensing partnerships.

Open source can become a key market weapon for penetration and adoption, while core IP can be protected by patent and licensing strategies.