Renewtek buy brings Vietnam capability to SMS

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SMS Management & Technology has delivered on its promises to continue growing through acquisition, picking up local enterprise content and business process management group Renewtek in a purchase that will bring it 140 staff, $17.3 million in annual revenues and an offshore facility in Saigon, Vietnam.

In a statement today, the IT services company’s chief executive Tom Stianos said Renewtek would fit “nicely” within SMS’ existing business, and would allow the company to start offering ECM and BPM options to its existing clients.

“We have been impressed by the maturity of the Renewtek business, including the creation of specific development tools and methods, all designed to accelerate and streamline the projects that they deliver,” the SMS chief said.

“We are confident that this new capability will prosper within SMS, giving it ready access to our five regional hubs and the national sales team. Renewtek has a strong sales pipeline in markets where SMS is already delivering other services, and their development tools will further strengthen our foothold in the financial services sector.”

Renewtek group managing director Fergus Porter said Renewtek could now take on larger scale projects as a result of being part of SMS, with the stronger financial position the larger company would bring it.

“We established Renewtek in 2004 with a view of becoming Australia’s leading technical consultancy and project delivery specialists within the ECM and BPM domains,” he said in the statement distributed by SMS. “We have made significant progress in achieving this goal, and we strongly believe that our next chapter – as part of SMS – will bring our aspirations to life.”

Senior Renewtek executives – Porter, as well as chief executive officer Craig Mullan and director of business development Patrick Lehane – will remain with the business and join SMS.

SMS has not previously had much of a focus on conducting work offshore. But the company said in its statement that over the past three years Renewtek had honed the processes needed to manage the hand-off between on-shore and off-shore work – including development and support work.

“SMS will use this as a foundation for the further expansion of its strategic initiative to provide clients with a broader range of delivery solutions … [it] will enable SMS to contest business it has otherwise not been in a position to respond to,” the company said.

The news comes as SMS has acquired a number of other local companies over the past few years. Earlier this year the company picked up Oracle consultancy Bright Blue Solutions, for example, and last year it bought two other companies, Aipex (which provides services around the Tibco technology line) and Pelion, which focuses on data management.

Image credit: Elaine Tan, royalty free