news Professional services giant Deloitte has announced the acquisition of IT integration specialist firm Sixtree, calling the move “another strategic investment and building block” for the firm’s technology practice and business solutions.
Founded in 2010, Sixtree offers consultancy services aimed to help enterprises bring the technology side of their business up to date using a platform-based approach to integrating emerging technologies with legacy systems.
The firm specialises in a range of technologies, some open-source, including those from MuleSoft, Red Hat, Elastic and Amazon Web Services.
“We’ve been through back office and customer technology change waves. We’re now seeing a new wave, where the next generation of cloud-enabled digital technologies are changing the way people work,” Robert Hillard, Deloitte’s Consulting Managing Partner, said.
“By essentially re-engineering and integrating an organisation’s systems, the deep expertise offered by the Sixtree team will help increase business agility by bringing legacy and new technologies together quickly, seamlessly and effectively,” he explained.
Notably, the Sixtree team will form the core of a “new platform engineering unit” within Deloitte Consulting’s technology advisory practice, Deloitte said.
Co-founders Ben Wylie and Yamen Sader will become Deloitte Consulting partners, while third co-founder Brett Wilson and CTO Saul Caganoff will become principals.
The 45-strong Australian team will join Deloitte in Melbourne and Sydney, while Sixtree’s New Zealand business will join Deloitte New Zealand.
Sixtree Chief Technology Officer Saul Caganoff commented: “Only five years ago, businesses were happy to outsource everything to big system-wide integrators and build multi-year projects that ultimately failed as they were too ambitious and too inflexible.”
“But huge changes in the way companies do business and how technology gets delivered have quickly emerged,” Caganoff explained. “Platform engineering and innovative solutions are the keys to enabling value and transformation quickly and incrementally, with ecosystems built through connectivity with modern and emerging technology partner and cloud providers.
Following the acquisition, the Sixtree team will remain “strong advocates” for open source technology, and will continue to sponsor open-source projects, developer community events, Deloitte said.
Deloitte Consulting partner and platform engineering leader, Clifford Foster, said: “We’ve collaborated successfully with Sixtree in the past, and this move is a natural evolution of the relationship. It will allow us to build a platform engineering business that will give our clients the capability and confidence to execute strategy and differentiate themselves from their competitors.”
The Sixtree acquisition follows a number of technology and other integrations undertaken by Deloitte in recent years, which saw teams from firms like Cloud Solutions Group, Qubit Consulting, Dataweave and Digivizer join the “Big Four” auditing firm.