Most data infrastructure problems live in one of four places: the architecture you’re about to pick, the migration you’re about to run, the bill you didn’t expect, or the AI feature you can’t ship because the data layer can’t hold it. This page is how we engage to fix them.
Every engagement starts with a thirty-minute diagnostic call. No deck. No pitch. You tell us what’s actually broken. We tell you whether we can help and what it would look like. From there, most buyers land in one of five shapes below.
| Pillar | Best first engagement | Also fits |
|---|---|---|
| Architecture and design | Strategic Advisory Retainer | Architecture Review, Fractional CDO |
| Migrations and modernization | Architecture Review | Tiger Team, Fractional CDO |
| Cost and efficiency | Architecture Review | Strategic Advisory, Tiger Team |
| AI and the data layer | Fractional CDO | Architecture Review, Tiger Team |
Training is horizontal. It shows up after one of the above engagements, when the team inheriting the system needs a shared vocabulary.
01
We spend two to three weeks inside your repos, dashboards, and cloud bill. You get a written report and a 90-minute readout with your team. No open-ended retainer. No mystery invoices. This is the engagement most cost-and-efficiency problems start with.
02
Ten to forty hours a month. We join your architecture reviews, pressure-test roadmaps, read designs before they go to the board, and take the calls your team does not want to make alone. This is the engagement most architecture-and-design problems start with.
03
The anchor engagement. We run data or AI infrastructure strategy end to end for a quarter or two. Writing docs, reviewing PRs, owning vendor calls, hiring the team that will replace us. This is where most AI and data-layer problems land once the shape is clear.
04
Project-scoped. We bring the skills your team is missing, scope a clear outcome, ship it with your team, and write the runbook. Cassandra migrations, production readiness work, performance work, AI data pipelines. We don’t hand off to juniors.
05
One to three days, on-site or remote. Cassandra internals, data on Kubernetes, distributed data patterns, or AI data infrastructure. Taught by people who wrote the book and shipped the code.
Most engagements start with an Architecture Review or an Advisory Retainer. Both are cheap ways to find out whether working together makes sense. Fractional and Tiger Team work almost always follows one of those. Training shows up at the end, once the team knows what they’re being trained for.
If the problem is already scoped and urgent, skip to Tiger Team. If the problem is vague and political, start with Advisory. If the problem is “we think the architecture is wrong but we aren’t sure,” that’s exactly what the Review is for.
If none of that feels right, just book the call. We’ll help you figure out which shape fits.
Expert-network calls are handled through GLG, AlphaSights, and Guidepoint, not through this site. Advisory board seats are by introduction only. Everything else lives on this page.
Every engagement begins with a 30-minute diagnostic call. No deck, no pitch. Bring us whatever you’re wrestling with. We’ll tell you what we see.