SoméStrategy GroupStart a conversationPrincipal-led legacy-to-next transition strategy
Somé Strategy Group helps established companies navigate product retirement, platform modernization, and installed-base migration—protecting revenue, operations, and customer trust from the decision through adoption.
It may be a physical device, an on-premise platform, a legacy service, or an acquired product line. Leadership knows it must change, but the installed base, recurring revenue, technical dependencies, contracts, support capacity, and customer behavior make the move harder than the destination.
Somé Strategy Group turns that complexity into a disciplined transition model: make the exposure visible, design the path forward, and enable the organization to move without damaging the economics or customer relationship.
Founder & principal advisor
Kennith Somé is a product and commercialization leader who helps established businesses shift from a legacy model to what comes next without breaking the economics or installed customer base.
Across his career, Kennith's transition work has replaced more than 1.5 million devices. At Optimum, he owned lifecycle and go-to-market strategy for a video CPE portfolio supporting 3.2 million connected devices and led complex equipment swaps and deprecations. At Cox, he managed lifecycle strategy across 30+ connected consumer products and helped take an expiring-connectivity migration through completion.
Recent advisory work has extended that pattern into broadband and fiber commercialization, portfolio diversification, and the transition of legacy municipal connectivity customers toward 5G. His advantage is the ability to connect portfolio intent with customer behavior, infrastructure readiness, capacity, pricing, legal obligations, and the operating cadence required to finish.
Selected operator outcomes
These are different moments in a broader career pattern: establish the real exposure, make the hard tradeoffs visible, design a workable migration motion, and govern the transition through the point of consequence.
Kennith audited an inaccurate completion measure, rebuilt the customer-and-device source of truth with Analytics, segmented the installed base by migration motion, and led the roadmap and executive operating cadence through deprecation.
Rather than replace every touchscreen, Kennith helped shape an adapter-based strategy combining direct shipment, customer self-installation, and opportunistic technician support—protecting continuity while controlling cost and field demand.
Kennith connected customer eligibility, market infrastructure, legacy economics, pricing, and migration sequencing, then helped develop an RFP for the primary device and second-screen option that materially improved platform economics.
Kennith converted a technical infrastructure issue into an executive customer-risk decision, quantified the downstream exposure, escalated across functions, and replaced uncontrolled activity with a staged migration strategy.
The 1.5M+ device figure reflects career-wide replacement impact. Program-level outcomes are presented separately and are not added into an artificial total. Client-sensitive details are limited to substantiated, appropriate context.
Signature method
Each engagement makes the business exposure visible, designs the transition, and equips the organization with the decisions and operating rhythm needed to move.
Create one decision-quality view of the installed base, revenue, cost, dependencies, customer friction, and consequences of delay.
Define the destination, customer cohorts, migration motions, offers, sequencing, economics, and measures that make movement possible.
Turn the strategy into clear ownership, coordinated workstreams, capacity decisions, escalation paths, and a durable execution rhythm.
Keep leadership focused on progress, risk, exceptions, adoption, and the explicit conditions required to complete the transition.
Ways to engage
Begin with a bounded diagnostic, build the full transition strategy, or add experienced governance to work already underway.
A focused executive assessment that shows what is at risk, what is blocking movement, and which decisions must be made before a transition is announced or reset.
The complete transition architecture for moving an installed base from a legacy product to the right destination with coordinated commercial and operational execution.
Principal-level guidance for leadership teams navigating active migrations, difficult tradeoffs, fragmented ownership, or decommissioning readiness.
For leadership teams that need a fact-based view of what to invest in, consolidate, modernize, or retire before a transition begins.
How we work
A simple through-line for complex transitions: establish the truth, define the path, and create the conditions for the organization to execute.
Discuss your transition ↗Establish the truth about the installed base, business exposure, customer friction, technical dependencies, and cost of delay.
Define the destination, customer treatments, commercial choices, sequencing, workstreams, and executive decisions required.
Put ownership, governance, measures, escalation paths, and exit criteria in place so the organization can carry the transition through.
The operator advantage
Kennith works across the full transition system—so technical readiness, customer behavior, economics, legal obligations, support capacity, adoption, and decommissioning do not become separate plans that fail at the seams.
Applies wherever established customers depend on
Point of view
Successful product transitions are managed as customer, commercial, and operating transformations—not as roadmap housekeeping.
The target architecture matters less than whether each customer has a credible destination, reason to move, and supported path forward.
Leadership needs a segmented view of exposure, adoption friction, migration economics, and the cost of delay before committing to a path.
A transition finishes only when ownership, readiness measures, exception handling, and the conditions for leaving the legacy model are explicit.
Moving beyond legacy is not a technology decision alone. It is a customer transition, a revenue decision, and an operating transformation—all at once.
When to call
Somé Strategy Group is most useful when leadership knows change is necessary but cannot yet see a credible, economically sound path for moving the installed customer base.
A legacy product, platform, or system is becoming expensive or difficult to support.
Customers must move to a cloud, digital, next-generation, or consolidated destination.
A merger or portfolio decision has created overlapping products, platforms, or customer journeys.
The transition plan exists, but ownership, priorities, or delivery keep resetting.
Revenue, churn, adoption, or operating exposure is unclear and leadership needs a decision-quality view.
The destination is technically ready, but the customer and operating model are not.
Frequently asked
The best time is before a public end-of-life announcement—when there is still room to shape the transition. We can also enter during an active migration to reset strategy, operating cadence, or customer segmentation.
No. The same transition problem appears when established companies move customers from legacy software, on-premise platforms, acquired product lines, subscription services, infrastructure, or connected devices. Telecommunications provides strong proof of scale; the method is built around the business pattern.
No. Engagements are designed as bounded strategic work or ongoing principal-level advisory. Somé Strategy Group defines the transition, decision system, and operating model without becoming a forty-hour-per-week replacement for an internal leader.
Kennith Somé leads the strategy, working sessions, and executive decision support directly. Somé Strategy Group is intentionally principal-led so clients work with the operator whose experience they engaged.
Established businesses with recurring revenue, a meaningful installed customer base, and a product, platform, system, or portfolio that must be retired, modernized, consolidated, or replaced—especially when the customer and economic consequences are material.
Start the conversation
A first conversation is private, practical, and focused on the legacy model, installed customer base, business trigger, and decision leadership needs to make.