A standing senior team that holds the lead on your estate, not a series of disconnected projects. The people who know the platform stay with it across the years.
Why Grove
Many trunks. One canopy.
A banyan starts as a single trunk. As it ages, the aerial roots that drop from its branches reach the ground, take hold, and thicken into trunks of their own. What was one tree becomes a connected stand: many trunks under one canopy, sharing one root system. A long-term DXP partnership becomes the same shape. The first engagement is one trunk. Then a second programme begins, then a third. The integration layer matures, the AI layer arrives. The team that built the original site is also running the migration, also building the new journey, also tending the support runbook. Many trunks, one connected partnership.
Sustain, maintain, enhance, all running continuously. Every Grove engagement contains all three. What varies is the proportion, not the presence.
Set at start, reviewed quarterly
A stable, mature platform is heavy on Sustain. A platform in growth mode is heavy on Enhance. The mix moves over the life of the partnership as the estate and the appetite for growth change.
Grove is multi-year and rolling, because the work of keeping a live platform alive, healthy and growing does not stop being needed. The relationship is the unit, not the project.
The structure
Sustain. Maintain. Enhance.
Three pillars run in parallel, not in sequence. Each is named in plain English, each runs continuously, each draws on a different shape of senior engineering work.
Grove Three pillars over one shared root system, the client estate. Enhance carries the lime mark
Fig 1 · Grove Three pillars over one shared root system, the client estate. Enhance carries the lime mark: the largest area of strategic growth, and where AI tooling pays off most.
The pillars
What each pillar holds.
The mix is set at the start and reviewed quarterly. Most engagements shift toward Enhance over time as the platform matures and the appetite for growth returns.
01
Sustain
Operational health. The planned engineering that keeps the platform current, secure and compliant, and prevents incidents from arriving in the first place. Different from incident response.
Includes: Vendor patching · major upgrades · security audits · performance · compliance
02
Maintain
Steady-state engineering. Bug fixes that are not incidents, integration updates as upstream APIs change, content model evolution, technical debt reduction. Stops a healthy platform becoming an unhealthy one.
Includes: Refactoring · integration updates · model evolution · tech debt · documentation
03
Enhance
New capability. New AI features, new customer journeys, new integrations and touchpoints. The work that grows the platform reach and value, and where AI tooling pays off the most.
Includes: AI builds · new journeys · integrations · analytics · platform extensions
In practice
One team, across the years.
A partnership is people who stay. The visual below is reserved for documentary photography of the practice at work, commissioned, never stock.
Many trunks, one canopy
A standing senior team holding the lead engineering role across the estate.
Holding quote · real attributable quote to be supplied before launch
Mark Andrews · CEO, TBSCGThe shortest engagement we have is six years. Not because we plan it that way. Because the work does not stop being needed.
Accreditations and platform partners
AWS Advanced Consulting Partner
AWS Advertising & Marketing Technology Competency
Magnolia
Contentful
Cloudinary
commercetools
Where the agentic lift happens
Less routine. More enhancement.
Agentic tooling clears the maintenance routine: dependency updates, regression checks, the mechanical upkeep that used to absorb senior hours. That time goes to the enhance pillar instead, which increasingly means shipping AI capability into the estate itself, governed the way the rest of the platform is. See what that looks like in AI & Gen AI.
Questions
Frequently asked questions.
What is the difference between Grove and Canopy?
Canopy keeps the platform online: monitor, detect, respond, resolve. Grove is the engineering work that evolves the platform over years: sustaining it, maintaining its health, and enhancing it with new capability. The two are distinct and often run alongside each other.
What are the three pillars?
Sustain keeps the platform alive: patches, upgrades, security, compliance, performance. Maintain keeps it healthy: refactoring, integration updates, content model evolution, technical debt. Enhance extends it: new capability, AI features, new customer journeys. All three run in parallel, in proportions set for your situation.
How long does a Grove partnership run?
Grove is multi-year and rolling. Most relationships run for years rather than months, because the work of sustaining, maintaining and enhancing a live platform does not stop being needed. The mix is set at the start and reviewed quarterly.
Does the balance of work change over time?
Yes. The proportion across the three pillars shifts over the life of the partnership. A stable, mature platform is heavy on Sustain. A platform in growth mode is heavy on Enhance. Most engagements move toward Enhance over time as the platform matures and appetite for growth returns.
Who holds the lead engineering role?
TBSCG does, by design. Grove is the agency-of-choice posture made operational: a standing senior team that holds the lead engineering role across your DXP estate, working as one connected partnership rather than a series of disconnected projects.
Where next
The connected partnership.
Grove is the long arc. It often begins elsewhere and layers with continuous support.
Layer it with support
24/7 Support Canopy
If a move comes first
DXP Replatforming The Banyan Method
If you are shaping it
Strategic Advisory Advisory
24/7 managed support. Keeping the platform online while Grove grows it.
DXP replatforming. A full move, in parallel, often the first trunk of a Grove partnership.
Strategic advisory. Choosing the right next step across a multi-year horizon.
Start here
Hold the lead.
Sustain, maintain, enhance, running in parallel over the life of the platform. One standing senior team, one connected partnership, the mix shaped to where your estate actually is.