Enabling Investors, Boards, and PortCos

Guiding investment decisions, steering portfolio companies, and building cloud-driven value across the portfolio

Cloud Lighthouse helps investors and private equity firms assess technological capability when making investment decisions, steer portfolio companies, build + execute a roadmap to absorb mergers and acquisitions into existing cloud estates, and invest smartly in cloud + AI technology to build value in the portfolio ahead of future events. We create replicable business value through cloud technology, turning data into an asset, architecting and building future-ready cloud ecosystems.

✔ Investment and board advisory

✔ Building value in portfolio companies

✔ Board of directors and non-executive service

✔ Angel investment

  • Guiding the CIO of a multi-billion industrial utilities firm absorbing multiple acquisitions, developing a future-ready Cloud ecosystem to build value ahead of new investment rounds.

  • Diversified a global, Forrester-ranked, PE-backed software firm, helping them to achieve revenue goals and close multiple multi-million $£€ deals across their fledgling Cloud Service portfolio.

  • Originated a business applications practice inside of a leading Microsoft Azure partner with new PE investment, adding $12 million (from $0) in revenue inside of twelve months.

  • Managed corporate strategy for a firm owned by private equity, building an entirely new practice as they grew to $250 million annual revenue on engagements worldwide.

  • Investor Advisory

    Understanding the technology and industry landscape, coaching non-technical financial decision makers, and evaluating current technical capabilities through the life of the transaction

  • Cloud Strategy

    Guiding IT and business leaders, crafting executive vision, prioritizing workloads that build value, and maximizing the value of technology investments via ecosystem-oriented architecture

  • AI Strategy

    Crafting and executing future-ready enterprise AI strategy with an emphasis on data consolidation and readiness, incremental and differential AI, and scaling AI across the organization

Insights for investors

Featured
How Power Platform scales generative AI across an organization

Power Platform scales AI and the data platform by providing a composable means of both data collection and delivery of insights and AI capability back to the user. Meanwhile, the great, often unsung capability of Power Platform is not the “app”, rather the ability (via Dataverse) of data transacted in a Power Platform solution to hydrate downstream data distribution scenarios such as analytical workloads, enterprise search, and—you guessed it—whatever AI infused workload you dream up. Let’s explore this.

RAG and the fundamentals of AI acting on enterprise data

CIOs and enterprise architects need not be experts in the technical mechanics of AI to formulate and execute an effective AI strategy. That said, it is critical that leaders driving their AI strategy understand this basic concept of how institutional AI—that is to say, AI workloads specific to your organization—both requires and acts on enterprise data. This approach is what we call “Retrieval Augmented Generation” or “RAG”, which you may have heard of. The name is quite literal: Here we are augmenting the generative pre-trained (and now you know what “GPT” stands for) model with data that we have retrieved from the organization’s data estate.

Building future-ready cloud ecosystems for the age of AI

Discussing AI in recent months I have often thought about the fable of the boiled frog, whereby a frog placed in boiling water jumps out, but a frog placed in warm water that is gradually heated lacks awareness of his impending demise until it is too late. Or, as I continue to remind the CIOs with whom I work closely, the grace period for organizations to get their act together and position themselves for the next wave is growing much shorter, the margin for error much more narrow.

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