About
Simon Plant
Simon Plant founded Mode2 and does the work on every engagement. He has been early on each platform shift since the web: hosting at IBM, the first cloud practices at Capgemini and AWS, an early AIOps platform at his own firm, generative AI as a CTO, and now agents built on Claude. He takes three Fractional CAIO seats at a time so each one gets real days.
What carries over to running AI
Early on every platform shift
The commercial web in the 1990s, public cloud from 2008, DevOps and AIOps in 2014, generative AI from 2023. Each time, he built the first practice that put it into production for large companies.
Governance and security first
Co-founded a managed security firm and qualified as a CISSP. Co-led enterprise architecture standards on one of the largest automotive IT estates.
Running engineering organizations
Built and ran professional services at RightScale, AWS and Rackspace, from first hire to a full Americas organization.
Founder, three times over
Alto, Orthus and DualSpark before Mode2. DualSpark was acquired by Datapipe.
Board room and code review
Ran the Office of the CTO at Redapt and has advised leadership teams as a fractional CTO since 2024. He still reads the diff.
Built on Claude
Simon builds his own agent tools and runs them. What he learns on them goes into the Foundation before it goes near a client.
An engineering harness for Claude Code: people own the task specs and acceptance tests, Claude implements each task in its own worktree, and hooks, replay gates and a separate reviewer check the work before a person approves the merge. Retired once Claude Code shipped its own orchestration.
A privacy-first platform for personal AI agents on your own hardware. Retired.
Trading agents
Advisory trading agents on Claude that propose, brief and alert, with deterministic pipelines and a tamper-evident event log. They never place an order.
An app Simon built.
Career
- 2024
Founder, Fractional CTO, Mode2
AI adoption, architecture and build-or-buy decisions for leadership teams. Now the Mode2 Foundation and the offers on this site.
- 2023
Chief Technology Officer, Redapt
Technology strategy across generative AI, cloud and security platforms. Built the Office of the CTO and advised client executives on AI.
- 2022
VP of Professional Services, Americas, Rackspace Technology
Ran the Americas services organization across the US, Canada and Mexico through an acquisition integration.
- 2020
Director of Technology Enablement, Slalom
Cloud strategy for large enterprises and studios; launched cloud-in-the-studio services with AWS and Microsoft; built managed services models.
- 2017
Founder and CTO, Mode2 LLC
A cloud-native consultancy. Serverless platforms for insurance and payments, and an application modernization practice.
- 2014
Co-founder and CEO, DualSpark
A DevOps firm. Built OSCAR, an early AIOps platform. Acquired by Datapipe.
- 2013
Regional Practice Manager, Professional Services, Amazon Web Services
Built the western US consulting organization from the start and delivered its first large enterprise engagements.
- 2010
Senior Director, Professional Services, RightScale
Led a globally distributed engineering team running customers' cloud workloads around the clock.
- 2009
Product Lead, Cloud Computing, Capgemini
Funded and built Capgemini's first cloud center of excellence; Capgemini became the first systems integrator to work with AWS.
- 2004
Chief Enterprise Architect, Capgemini
Architecture leadership on a major automotive account, including bringing its IT in-house and introducing it to AWS. Before that, retail and consumer goods clients in the UK.
- 2002
Chief Architect, Stentra
Designed a global bank's foreign exchange trading platform, from deal capture to automated settlement.
- 1999
Founder and CTO; co-founder, CTO and CSO, Alto and Orthus
A technology consultancy for banks and internet companies, carried through the dot-com crash, and a managed security firm.
- 1994
Graduate trainee to consultant, IBM Global Services
Led the technical build of the IBM Global Network's internet content hosting service line.
Full history on LinkedIn.
Certifications
Anthropic's certification results are listed here in the form Anthropic issues them, as each one is passed.
The method, as commitments
- 01
A fixed price and a time promise.
Every offer has a published price and a date it ends.
- 02
A named engineer before a build is sold.
You meet the person who builds it before you sign.
- 03
Every agent built so the model can be swapped.
Your agent outlives any one model release.
- 04
Outcomes measured before and after.
We record the numbers first, so the change is visible.
- 05
One foundation under every client.
Code, Controls, Agent base and Governance, maintained by Mode2, so each engagement starts further along.
- 06
A release within 30 days of every Anthropic change.
The new model is tested against your evals, settings and controls are updated, new features are adopted and cost is re-baselined.
Three seats, on purpose
Simon takes three Fractional CAIO seats at a time, and a portfolio seat counts as two. Each seat gets real days. When the three are taken, the next seat waits.
How an engagement runs
Scoping call
Thirty minutes on what you need. You leave knowing which offer fits and what it costs.
Fixed scope
A written scope with the price and the end date. For a build, you meet the engineer before you sign.
Baseline
We measure where you are before we change anything.
The work
Weekly, against the plan you signed. You see progress in your own systems.
After
The same measures again, then a retainer if you want us to keep running it.
Book a 30-minute scoping call.
Thirty minutes on what you need, which offer fits, and the fixed price for it.