Deloitte acquires Melbourne integrator Sixtree

Deloitte has acquired Melbourne-headquartered enterprise integrator Sixtree.

Sixtree will become the core of a new engineering platform unit within Deloitte’s technology advisory practice, the company said Tuesday morning.

"[Sixtree staff] enable generally older businesses that have become rigid, and even trapped, by outdated, unintegrated technology systems to become ‘younger’ and more agile by wrapping digital applications and new technologies into an adaptable platform to meet immediate, medium and longer term needs," Deloitte Consulting partner and platform engineering leader Clifford Foster said.

He added that Deloitte has collaborated with Sixtree in the past and the acquisition was a natural move.

The value of the deal was not disclosed.

Sixtree was founded in 2010 by Ben Wylie, Brett Wilson and Yamen Sader. On 1 August, Wylie and Sader will become Deloitte Consulting partners, and Wilson and chief technology officer Saul Caganoff will become principals.

Sixtree's 45 employees will join Deloitte in Melbourne and Sydney, and the New Zealand team will join Deloitte New Zealand.

[Related: What's hot in software? We ask Sixtree]

"[Deloitte] get what we do and the value we can deliver, and there are clear synergies, complementary skills and capabilities in terms of what we are doing and where we want to go," Sixtree chief technology officer Saul Caganoff said.

Sixtree specialises in technologies from MuleSoft, Red Hat, Elastic and AWS. The company stated it would remain a strong advocate for open source technology and continue to sponsor open source projects, developer community meetups and hackathons.

Deloitte has been growing its technology business with a string of acquisitions in the past two years. In June 2015, Deloitte acquired Sydney Oracle partner Dataweave. Last September, it acquired another Oracle reseller, Qubit Consulting, which at the time was raking in approximately $5.5 million annual revenue.

The consulting giant acquired Melbourne-based Cloud Solutions Group in November last year. Deloitte also formed an alliance with social analytics firm Digivizer.

Deloitte Consulting managing partner Robert Hillard said the latest move was another strategic investment and building block for the firm’s technology practice.

"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. And this is where Sixtree and its platform integration capabilities and client solutions, in addition to our existing customer and digital teams, comes in," he said.