Principal-led
The person who scopes the work is the person who does it.
Strategic Advisory
Vergemont is a strategic advisory practice for digital infrastructure and telecommunications.
Corporate strategy, product strategy, and technology and policy perspective for operators, owners, and investors from someone who spent two decades building world-class products and services, then led corporate strategy for the infrastructure underneath them.
Sectors
Digital Infrastructure
- Data centers & interconnect
- Macro towers & small cells
- In-building & venue wireless
- Edge computing & peering
- Behind-the-grid generation & storage
Telecommunications
- Mobile & fixed wireless
- FTTH & cable access networks
- Enterprise fiber
- Managed network & security services
Point of View
Ten-year capital commitments are being made against a software and services layer that gets rewritten in less than two years. Most of the value created on top of new capacity has historically been captured a layer above the company that funded it. What do you have a claim on once the capacity is live in a rapidly evolving ecosystem?
Practice Areas
Corporate, product, technology. Three intersecting paths to growth.
Portfolio positioning, growth architecture, and expansion strategy for businesses whose assets are data centers, towers, fiber or cable routes, or spectrum.
- Portfolio review and asset positioning
- Growth architecture and adjacency mapping
- Market entry and expansion
- Ecosystem definition and partnership structure
- Commercial diligence and market view for a transaction
Portfolio design, packaging, and revenue architecture for products and services that ship at scale to homes and enterprises. FTTH, cable, mobile, and in-building wireless, along with the CPE, install, and churn economics underneath them.
- B2C and B2B product and service portfolio alignment
- Roadmap sequencing and prioritization logic
- Positioning and segmentation
- Pricing and revenue model design
- Endpoint and CPE economics
How network and compute architectures are evolving, and what that means commercially. Access technology, radio and transport, siting, and power, assessed alongside demand, spectrum supply, and policy direction.
- What AI demand means for capacity planning, network operations, and unit economics
- Where compute lands: hyperscale, regional, and edge, and what power availability means for the answer
- Access technology paths: FTTH, DOCSIS, fixed wireless, in-building wireless
- Spectrum: holdings and adjacencies read against auction timing, allocation direction, and sharing regimes.
- Standards and industry roadmaps, and what they signal about the next architecture cycle
Approach
Senior attention, from start to finish.
Owner side and product side
Two decades building consumer and enterprise products at national scale, then leading corporate strategy for a shared-infrastructure business.
Decision-first
Every engagement starts from a decision on the table and works backward.
Past the recommendation
Sequencing, tradeoffs, and the questions that only surface after approval.
Most of Michael's career has been spent on the operator side, building products that ship at national scale. At one of the largest cable companies, he invented and launched a neighborhood Wi-Fi network now spanning 23 million access points, designed three generations of wireless home gateways, rebuilt a legacy landline business into a mobile-centric platform that grew from 500,000 households to 11.5 million, and launched the company's first home security and smart home ecosystem. Earlier, at a global internet company, he chose the partners and led the integration that embedded real-time audio and video into consumer instant messaging, the technology that later became the foundation of WebRTC.
More recently he has focused on the ownership side: he led corporate strategy for a public digital infrastructure company with 40,000 towers, 105,000 small cells, and a 90,000-route-mile fiber network, advising executive management and the board on portfolio positioning, adjacencies, M&A, and competitive strategy across mobile and enterprise markets. He directed the strategic review behind an $8.5 billion divestiture. Additionally, he supervised technology strategy and innovation portfolio management, spanning 5G infrastructure, private wireless, edge computing, drones, and energy storage, and worked with standards bodies, universities, and government on shared-infrastructure initiatives.
Vergemont brings both domains to a single engagement: what gets built, and who ends up owning the value it creates.
Contact
Start with the situation.
A paragraph is enough: what you're weighing, and by when.