Published on the 20/07/2016 | Written by Beverley Head
Needing additional funds to grow, systems integration specialist Sixtree has instead sold to Deloitte…
The company, which has 45 staff in Australia and 15 in New Zealand – all of whom will transition into Deloitte Australia and Deloitte New Zealand in August – was founded in 2010. It will now form the core of a platform engineering unit in Deloitte Consulting’s technology advisory practice. The two firms have worked on engagements together in the past and claim that their cultures and ‘way of working’ is already compatible.
According to Clifford Foster, Deloitte Consulting partner and platform engineering leader; “This is part of the larger capability we are trying to build. There’s a real advantage having it internally,” rather than maintaining the arm’s length arrangement, he said.
Foster said that although Deloitte had capability in the platform engineering and systems integration area in its international offices, particularly in North America and Europe, it was “not in abundance” in Australia or New Zealand. “While we consulted we lacked the deep expertise to implement,” he said.
How much Deloitte has paid to beef up its implementation capability has not been revealed. It has however been spending up big of late buying in teams from Cloud Solutions Group, Qubit Consulting, Dataweave and Digivizer.
Clifford however said that it was “Far more than a grab bag” of IT skills sets that the company had acquired, rather the takeovers represented a realignment of Deloitte’s ANZ capabilities.
With Sixtree it acquires a team skilled in the use of MuleSoft, Elastic, Red Hat and Amazon Web Services technologies. The company’s chief technology officer, Saul Caganoff, who will become a Deloitte principal come August, said that Sixtree had “Approached this with a reasonable amount of caution, then care” as it wanted to ensure there was an appropriate culture fit between the companies.
“We have been working with Deloitte on a number of projects and have worked well together,” he said.
He explained that Sixtree’s recent growth trajectory was partly responsible for the sale as that was becoming very hard to sustain. Also the company was mindful that it was approaching; “the magic number of 100 (staff) where a lot of companies struggle.”
Sixtree had already identified that there would be structural changes required to sustain the growth and also that to “work further up the strategy chain would require quite a bit of effort and expenditure.”
Following the Deloitte acquisition Sixtree personnel can be parachuted into that strategy work, while Deloitte will at the same time be able to plug some gaps in its implementation repertoire.
