Sydney's Campfire Digital Services commits to enablement services following management buyout

IT consultancy Campfire Digital Services is under new ownership as long-time director Shayne Tanner has completed a management buyout of the company to lead it into a new direction.

Tanner told CRN his former co-directors Paul Robinson and Terry Mueller will be retained in various capacities, with Robinson staying on as an advisor for some input around client acquisition, while Mueller will remain involved working across Campfire’s key accounts in Western Australia and the company’s wider engineering practice.

Campfire, formerly known as Permeance Technologies, specialises in IT consulting, digital experience design and software development services. Some of its vendor partners include Adobe and Liferay, and its offices are in Sydney, Perth, Melbourne and Adelaide.

The company is also one of the firms that comprise the IT services consortium LIFT Alliance, joining ASG Group, Kinetic IT and Perth-based software development house Systemic Pty Ltd. LIFT Alliance was recently awarded the Channel Collaboration Award at the CRN Impact Awards for its work with the WA Department of Education.

“I felt like I had more work to do, and that journey that we’ve been through is not over and there’s a bit more to be done,” Tanner told CRN.

“Our business needs to constantly be evolving to reflect the technologies that we're implementing because they're constantly changing, so therefore we’ve become more business enabling and less dependent on [software] developers and IT.

“As the technologies become more innovative and enabling, we also have to reflect that change.”

The buyout was officially completed in late September, and Tanner said the change of ownership would have minimal impact to the staff and would involve no change of resource.

Campfire had its roots in software development, implementing open source software for enterprise customers like content management systems and portal technology. Government has always been a major client base for the firm, including the education sector.

Portals, which Tanner said is now more commonly referred to as “Digital Experience platforms” to broaden the scope of how they are implemented, had been a strong business for Campfire during the pandemic, including the WA Department of Education project through LIFT Alliance.

Tanner said the pivot to digital experience had been a gradual process, where Campfire would develop a solution for a customer that would ultimately not be adopted in the end for a number of reasons, including the lack of user engagement and engagement beyond IT.

“IT [departments] were trying to say to the business, ‘You will use this’, and the business goes, ‘Well, actually, we’re the business, why don’t we get to choose?’,” he said.

“With those kinds of experiences, we felt like we needed to get closer to the business - and that it's very gradual. Because then you think, ‘Well, what does that look like getting close to the business?’. you need to have roles and capability and we can actually converse with the business and make sense for the business.

“We’ve always had business analysts, but now the customer experience consultants and the user experience consultants get involved much earlier on, to validate, ‘Are we actually solving a problem?’, ‘Is there a problem to be solved?’”