Tecala acquires intelligent automation group rapidMATION

Sydney-headquartered technology services provider Tecala has acquired intelligent automation group rapidMATION.

Founded in 2018, Sydney-based rapidMATION’s services include process mapping, digital process automation, rapid process automation and automated document processing.

The acquisition will see Tecala create a new business unit called 'ADA', which stands Automation, Data, and Artificial Intelligence.

The entire rapidMATION team will join Tecala, resulting in a combined team of 200 people.

“The integration of rapidMATION and the creation of ADA is the latest development in our long-term strategy to embrace new and emerging technologies," Tecala's managing director Pieter DeGunst stated.

"Tecala and rapidMATION share a common vision around the mission critical importance of AI-powered intelligent automation," rapidMATION's CEO and co-founder Shaun Leisegang stated.

"It is rare to find an opportunity where there is not only a great complementary business fit but, more importantly, a solid cultural fit between our teams. It really is a scenario of one plus one being three.”

Culture fit and Australian team

DeGunst said that Tecala spent the last 12 months reviewing over 100 businesses, finding in rapidMATION attributes that aligned with its own.

"We wanted to see really strong cultural fit, which we saw. We wanted to see some shared ideology around the types of customers we want to serve," DeGunst told CRN Australia.

“The aspiration from day one and what we have absolutely done is integrate the team completely into our business and just scale from there. So that culture fit was really important, the way you sort of view the world."

Tecala also liked rapidMATION’s SMB focus.

"[rapidMATION] could easily have just gone and spent all their time in the enterprise - they didn't. They purposefully built a business that was targeting small to mid enterprise like Tecala,” DeGunst said.

Having an Australian-based team also worked in rapidMATION’s favour.

"A lot of providers out there have offshored their development capabilities and robotic process automation capabilities. They built an Australian team, which is exactly what Tecala is doing and we're very passionate about that.”

"We believe that gives the best possible quality outcome, the best possible security outcome to our clients.”

'Natural evolution'

DeGunst told CRN Australia that intelligent automation was a natural evolution of Tecala's business.

"I think when you look at a traditional Tecala core customer, often we are managing and hosting their cloud repositories, we're often obviously managing their IT services from an operational perspective, so you've got eyes across the end user computing environment, the network stack, the cloud stack, but more importantly the data,” he said.

"We can see the data, we can manage the data, and then our view was we can help optimise what our clients can do with that data in terms of business process optimisation through the lens of automation."

"To us, it's a very natural evolution - not just what we're doing in the automation arena, but in the security space as well.”

Tecala saw the opportunity to “fundamentally change the unit economics of how many people you need to perform a certain task and how you can scale and grow a business.”

“You can have very material impacts to the ability to scale a business and disassociate that scale from people,” DeGunst said.

AI use cases

In addition to major use cases like conversational AI, DeGunst saw an opportunity to use AI to help businesses address gaps in software platforms.

"A lot of organisations have the big monolithic platforms as their building blocks; Office 365 is very common, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, ServiceNow. For an overall business to run, and you think about all the business processes that need to occur, there are usually gaps," DeGunst said.

"You can either try to address those gaps by doing custom development and trying to make all these platforms do these wonderful things, or you can actually have a strategy where you build micro applications that will deliver certain business functions, and that's what rapidMATION do."

"We fundamentally believe that is a smart way for organisations to be able to take small portions of what needs to be done in their business and move it into a mobile application, move it into software-as-a-service solutions, and not spend millions and millions of dollars on these big monolithic applications."

For example, DeGunst pointed to the rapidMATION Triagr email triage tool and to a contract management solution Tecala built for an architectural firm and which Tecala is planning to take to market.

"Every business has to manage contracts, and so where we're using AI for that is the ability to ask the engine questions about your contracts. [Ask] 'Where do my risks lie', and it can point you straight to a clause. Or [say] 'I'd like to understand if I have the right to do this under this contract' and it will be able to respond to you."

"So as opposed to having to read a 120-page contract, you can ask a two-second question and it responds immediately and that potentially saves you hours of reading."

Managed services growth

Asked about Tecala’s broader business, DeGunst said that managed services were the main driver for growth.

Optimising cloud costs was a “big trend”, with the objective to free up customers’ budgets for cybersecurity and AI-powered automation.

“If you don't automate and leverage AI and things like that, your sort of stuck [with] cost [going] up as your revenue goes up,” he argued.