Q&A with President & CEO of SilverTech Nick Soggu

Manchester native Nick Soggu founded SilverTech in his hometown in 1996 as a web design firm. Now based in Bedford, the company works with clients on digital marketing, content strategy, database management, website development and other methods of maximizing customer engagement.

Its clients have included JG Autographs, Nova Scotia Power, Dead River Company, NASA, Capital One, Life Is Good, American Water, Southern New Hampshire University, Sharp Electronics and the State of New Hampshire.

Soggu earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering at Merrimack College and the University of New Hampshire, respectively. Nearly 30 years later, he has embraced becoming an expert in emerging technologies by pursuing a Doctor of Engineering degree in artificial intelligence and machine learning at George Washington University, where he is scheduled to complete his studies in 2026.

SilverTech recently acquired Paragon, a customer research, digital consultancy and enterprise web solutions company based in Cleveland, Ohio. Soggu recently stopped by the offices of NH Business Review to appear as a guest on the “Down to Business” podcast. This article was adapted from that interview and was edited for length and clarity.

Talk a little bit about what you do and this new acquisition. What is SilverTech, and what is your history with it?

The current form of what we are is termed a digital experience agency. Back when I founded it, we were a web development company. That’s how much the industry has evolved and changed. But really today it’s about building digital experiences for our clients to be able to engage with customers in a way that gives them the best product or service as quickly as possible from the people that they’re buying from. Ultimately, that’s where the agency has kind of transformed itself.

What attracted you to Paragon? What did they bring that you didn’t have?

Pre-Paragon, SilverTech was about a 90-person company in southern New Hampshire. We’d done an acquisition in the Indianapolis area about four or five years ago. That bolstered up some of our skill sets and our capabilities. But what’s happening in that digital experience landscape is that there are these tools like WordPress and other content management systems. Paragon just happened to have a very complementary set of tool sets that they operated their business around. The acquisition helps us cover that landscape really well. It builds a foundation for where we want to take the agency and the combined entity into the future.

You’re talking about expanding the menu of services you can provide to clients. What do clients look for now? There’s so much noise out there. How do you break through that?

A lot of our clients have basically amassed a lot of systems that collect a lot of data. The work that we do is to action against the data that’s collected. The problem for most of the brands that we end up working with is that the data sits in siloed systems.

The vision for the agency into the future is to be able to provide a one-stop solution, for our clients to be able to come to us and say, “Hey, I’ve got this digital experience. I want to build everything from generating leads all the way to servicing them on a reoccurring basis. But I want all that data, and I want to be able to collect it in one location, and then I want to be able to action against that data properly.”

That’s the value proposition we bring to the marketplace.

Now that you have Paragon under your wings, what does the next few years look like in SilverTech’s future?

The next segment for us is being able to work with our clients and the people we service on a regular basis and help them collect and unify all this data into one location, and then build intelligence around that data, and then continue using the tools we’re building on now to action against that data.

It’s that full stack of building web digital experiences and collecting that data across those digital experiences and non-digital experiences. And then learning business intelligence around that data using AI/ML (artificial intelligence and machine learning) tools and then actioning against that data.

It’s really coming full circle in terms of where the vision is.

I truly believe as a company of our type in our industry, we’re on the very cutting edge of thinking like this and where we want to take it. It’s kind of neat to know that this is something that’s New Hampshire based and grew out of southern New Hampshire.