Silicon Valley Software Group
Digital Transformation Enablers

Technology is changing rapidly. Enterprises with legacy systems are struggling to keep up with emerging technologies, integrate new capabilities into their current products, and compete effectively for their customers. While traveling the world as a startup CTO, Matt Swanson, now Managing Partner of Silicon Valley Software Group (SVSG), saw this firsthand. Through multiple conversations with Fortune 500 executives who were curious why Silicon Valley companies could launch new products so quickly, while their own organizations lagged, it became readily apparent to Matt that these companies just didn’t have access to a deep enough pool of senior technology executives to help them make key changes necessary to transform their product organizations. “So I brought together a group of my colleagues—all former Silicon Valley CTOs—to start a strategic advisory group to fill the gap,” notes Swanson.

The core of the problem is in legacy enterprise architectures. “Today we're often approached by organizations who are spending the majority of their engineering budgets maintaining existing infrastructure, choking their ability to innovate and stifling their ability to launch products to protect and expand their market share. We are providing these companies with new architectures—for example, transitioning organizations with a large number of monolithic products onto a microservices architecture—allowing them to specialize engineering functions, ultimately transforming their products and accelerating future development.”

Competitors who can leverage new technology can provide products and services to customers faster and cheaper, while those who are mired in legacy tools are left behind losing market share. SVSG understands the short-term need for the transformation skillset to support movement to a digital enterprise architecture. And that’s their mission—to provide clients the talent, professionalism, and experience of a team composed of Silicon Valley CTOs who have hands on experience creating the world’s most innovative and disruptive companies so that their clients can successfully compete going forward.

A team composed of Silicon Valley CTOs who have hands on experience creating the world’s most innovative and disruptive companies

SVSG assesses organizations they work with in three critical areas—people, processes, and technology—against best practices their team has developed as acting Silicon Valley CTOs (something they call the “Silicon Valley Benchmark”). An example of how SVSG provided expertise to a client is an engagement with a company who produces semiconductor equipment. The client was a mature company using a legacy on-premises product to provide services to their customers. They were beginning to see competitors offer similar solutions cheaper and faster by leveraging cloud technology. To remain competitive, and retain their current market share, it was critical that the company embrace a new cloud architecture and embark on a digital transformation. SVSG identified an optimal “go to market” product to pilot the digital shift, helped them oversee the development and deployment of that test solution, and prepared them to deploy it throughout their organization. Today, they are continuing that disruption through the rest of their product line. Another example of an SVSG engagement is their work with J.D. Power and Associates to build a data analytics product for the market.

The future of SVSG looks busy. Since their inception, their goal has been to provide strategic guidance into the world of incredibly fast change driven by emerging technology disruptions. “Over the years, we’ve been able to help many companies in ways that we hadn’t even thought possible. Companies not only can launch products much faster, but reinvent themselves with ideas that were completely outside of their current thinking and that’s been very gratifying,” concludes Swanson.