Fractional CTO and fractional technical leadership
Losing both a CTO and an engineering development manager within a short window left a B2B payments provider without any technical leadership right as it needed to prepare for a sale. Ollon stepped in as fractional CTO to stabilize operations, assessing the engineering team's structure and reorganizing it to close the gaps in productivity and process that leadership departure had exposed. That stabilization meant the company had a single accountable technical leader driving decisions through the transition instead of a leadership vacuum during its most consequential year. The company entered its acquisition process with technical leadership already in place, not scrambling to explain who was actually running engineering.
Due diligence and acquisition preparation
A B2B payments provider's planned sale meant its technology and team would face scrutiny from a buyer's due diligence process. Ollon served as the technical point of contact for that process, representing the company directly to the acquirer's due diligence team and making sure their questions about the systems and team got answered. That direct involvement meant due diligence moved through someone who could speak to the technology with authority, rather than staff still learning their own new roles after the leadership departures. The company completed its acquisition with due diligence handled directly by Ollon from start to finish.
Legacy system modernization
A B2B payments provider's core system ran as a VB6 monolith on a single server, paired with one heavily customized SQL Server database too specialized for a managed RDS instance. The team had already begun pulling functionality out of that monolith into a mix of Ruby, Python, and React, and had recently moved from a colocation data center to AWS as a straight lift and shift, running the same EC2 instances the same way they had before, without any auto scaling or managed service configuration. Ollon advised at a leadership level, prioritizing and sequencing that modernization work for the team. That direction gave the team a roadmap for finishing the monolith breakup and putting AWS's capabilities to actual use.
Post-acquisition transition
Closing an acquisition did not mean a B2B payments provider's technical work was actually finished, since a buyer inheriting new systems and a newly reorganized team still needed continuity through the handover itself. Ollon stayed engaged for several months after the acquisition closed, helping the acquiring company's own team understand the systems and processes put in place during the stabilization work. That continued involvement meant institutional knowledge about the modernization work did not disappear the moment ownership changed hands. The transition to new ownership happened with someone available who actually understood what had been built.
Technical debt reduction
A B2B payments provider had let technical debt accumulate across multiple layers at once, a legacy VB6 monolith, a SQL Server database too customized to modernize easily, and a partial migration to AWS that had stalled. Ollon helped the team prioritize which of those debts to address first given limited time before the planned sale, focusing effort on the pieces most likely to concern a buyer. That prioritization concentrated the team's effort on the debt that mattered most, avoiding a scattershot approach across every problem simultaneously. The company entered its sale having made real, targeted progress on its highest priority technical debt.
