AWS work for PE portfolio companies, sequenced to your hold period.

Two engagements with PE in the room

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.

Where the complexity shows up

The hold period sets your budget cycle and your strategic horizon. Multi-year monolithic transformations don't fit; equally, no work at all leaves the technology debt to compound through to exit.

The exit picture pulls forward decisions about data, cost discipline, and platform robustness. The numbers that will sit in your diligence pack need to be defensible and produced cleanly.

Operating partners and portfolio CTOs work with different consulting models. 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.

How we think about portfolio-company work

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.

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.

What we bring to PE portfolio companies

Hold-period sequencing

Engagements scoped against your hold period and your value plan rather than against a generic three-year roadmap.

Re-architecture in chunks

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-funded discovery and assess

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.

Honest views

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.

In practice

Janes (Montagu-owned during the engagement) 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 (twelve hours to under two minutes), 35 times more data sources.

UK Tote Group (PE-owned during the engagement period before the £115 million sale) 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.