Ambitious and ready to go global: ex-Servian leaders launch Vivanti Consulting

Three years after selling to Cognizant, former Servian leaders Tony Nicol and Tim Mannah have launched a new venture, Vivanti Consulting.

Having completed their earn-outs and now in a “fortunate fiscal position” the duo has brought together a trio of acquisitions to form the new data-focused cloud consultancy.

Based in Sydney, but expanding rapidly, Vivanti will continue Servian’s legacy as Snowflake and Databricks partners, but with a keen eye towards emerging technology.

“We were having a fantastic time doing what we loved and we just wanted to continue that journey,” Nicol told CRN.

“Cognizant is great, but it’s a very different culture to the type Servian was.”

Nicol founded Servian in 2008, with Mannah joining as head of digital and UX in 2013. When it was acquired by Cognizant in 2021, Servian employed 500 people and had worked with more than 190 enterprise clients across Australia and New Zealand.

Their new venture Vivanti, meanwhile, will serve as the core go-to-market brand under which sit the acquisitions, Fast Lane, an operational data specialist; Matr Consulting, a one-person Databricks shop and Snowflake partner BluSnow, which is being overseen by Mannah.

The acquisitions, plus a significant cohort from Servian, have brought Vivanti’s team to 45 people in just two months.

“Previously, that type of growth would have taken us 20 months from Servian’s launch. And we’re here now within a couple of months.

“I think this is a testimony to what we believe in; how much we believe in this and the fact we’re doing it for the right reasons.”

Bolder growth

One thing that separates Vivanti’s origins from Servian’s is the ambition of its founders to scale faster and bolder.

As Nicol admits, the duo is in the fortunate position to have a strong cash flow due to the Servian acquisition, meaning they are no longer subject to the constraints of investors’ sway.

“One of the things we want to do differently now is expand, rather than waiting for three, four, seven years. And that builds a lot of excitement. Before we waited until Sydney was a certain size before opening Melbourne. This time, we’re a little more aggressive,” said Nicol.

As such, Vivanti has already opened an office in Brisbane, a small team in the United States and is preparing to open in Melbourne.

More importantly, to Nicol and Mannah, Vivani is set to open an office in the United Kingdom, something it was ready to launch with Servian but that was parked following the Cognizant acquisition.

“Towards the end of our journey, we really cracked the code on scale and regional growth,” said Mannah, who was the lead behind Servian’s UK launch until 2021. “Before we were often sensible and even cautious. But now that we’ve done it, we’re looking at other regions at an earlier stage.”

In terms of capabilities, Vivanti will continue Servian’s strong legacy of data solutions, as Mannah noted: “Even though we did so much more than data, that’s what made us famous.”

Snowflake, Databricks and Google Cloud will continue to serve as their main vendor partnerships, alongside, to a lesser extent, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

However, Nicol is particularly ambitious about bridging Vivanti’s consultancy expertise with the technical capabilities of his other company, the video data and artificial intelligence provider Visual Cortex.

“We will be absolutely pushing that technology because I do believe it is class-leading in what you can do in a vision, camera-based world,” Nicol explained.2

“A core IP we have is getting people from proof-of-concepts to building out the levers so they can start using more advanced AI that will make a difference in their business. Everyone is having these types of conversations now, and that’s where I want our focus to be over the next 24 months.”

Turning talent into leaders

For both Nicol and Mannah, one of their proudest legacies from Servian was training multiple fleets of young tech talent into highly specialised consultants.

That stemmed from a culture whereby training and development were fostered through group encouragement and collaboration.

“One of the things we’re most passionate about is the consultant experience and providing learning and development opportunities,” explained Mannah. “And this is highly tied to growth. If [our people] are not being turned on by what they’re working on, it’s very hard to retain them as consultants.”

The duo eyes tech hiring as a long-term investment that allows hires the opportunity to progress from consultants to partners and “eventually leaders”.

“Some people can just walk in to get to senior leadership, but for most of us it requires a journey: a few steps at a time,” said Nicol. “And that’s how we see consulting.

“Because people realise we are long-term thinking, both with our clients and our consultants, it allows people to be the version of themselves they want to be.”

He added: “I’m a big believer in setting goals, but I don’t think you should tell anyone how to do their job. If you do that, it is bad for their heart and soul, and you really kill their chance of learning things, especially leadership.”