Australian technology and transformation partner xAmplify has acquired Accelerate IT Solutions, a WA-based ServiceNow specialist provider.
Accelerate, co-founded by John Boyland and Mayank Verma around nine years ago, is a two-time techpartner.news Fast50 honouree, placing at #33 in 2023 and rising to #13 in 2024.
xAmplify CEO Wayne Gowland said that the decision to acquire the company comes down to reach, scale and growth.
“What [acquiring] Accelerate does is gives us a really genuine national ServiceNow capability and significantly strengthens our presence in WA, bringing two highly capable teams together with a shared focus to help customers drive technology investment and drive better improvements across their organisations,” he explained.
“We have a very small presence in WA, but this really significantly increases our presence, and further complements the investments we made over the last 12 months into Queensland and South Australia.”
xAmplify already had a “very well established ServiceNow practice” on the east coast of the country, with that practice prior to the acquisition sitting at around 65 people - one of “Australia's largest sovereign ServiceNow practices”, Gowland claimed.
“This extends that ServiceNow practice further; this doesn't add new capability [or] fill a gap,” he told techpartner.news, with the company’s national headcount of 250 now growing to 280 with the addition of Accelerate.
“We're not changing the leadership of the Accelerate team. They integrate into our existing ServiceNow practice and bolt on. Our job is to preserve what Accelerate has built, but on top of that, give their people access to more opportunities, larger customers, more capabilities, and stronger career pathways."
Accelerate IT Solutions’ Boyland said the acquisition reflected the changing expectations of customers.
"Our clients still want deep technical expertise, but they also want a partner who understands how technology fits into the bigger picture of their organization,” he said.
“Joining xAmplify means we can continue delivering the ServiceNow capability we're known for while giving customers access to broader expertise across strategy, AI, organisational change, cyber security and managed services.
"Most importantly, we found a partner whose culture and customer-first approach closely align with our own. That gives our people and our customers confidence about what's next."
A genuine national ServiceNow capability
The acquisition of Accelerate is the third in recent history for xAmplify, who bought Canberra-based IT advisory firm CTO Group in August of last year, and two months later, acquired Green Cloud Consulting, a specialist in TechnologyOne ERP solutions.
The company was also, at one time, slated to merge with Perth's CSO Group, but the move was called off midway through last year, with both companies opting to return to a strategic partnership model.
Despite Accelerate’s joining the fold marking the third M&A transaction in just over 12 months, Gowland said he wouldn't describe it as “an acquisition spree”, but instead proof that xAmplify is executing a deliberate strategy to scale responsibly to ensure that it deliver increased value for customers.
“Each acquisition has to strengthen a specific part of our overall operating model, and that also needs to extend our national reach or deepen our capacity or ability to deliver better outcomes for our customers,” he stated.
“Green Cloud really strengthened our enterprise platform capability and also increased our Queensland presence, where Accelerate gives us a genuine national ServiceNow capability, but importantly also gives us a platform to expand into that WA market.
“We know there's a number of critical infrastructure and utility and energy and resource organisations in WA, and they're all under pressure to modernise and to drive improvements. It’s a deliberate strategy to build a national platform, but we also have this ambition to scale out what is Australia's alternative to the global or the large multinational consultancy firms.”
Automation and AI at the forefront
Gowland said when xAmplify built its managed service offering three years ago, it was built with automation and AI at the core, with the aim of driving “innovation, improvement, and efficiencies”.
The founder said that the company's managed service offering is underpinned by an “extremely mature AI and automation framework” that allows xAmplify to reduce the cost of delivering services.
Its also building a number of “AI accelerators” that can be repeatable and used within multiple customer organisations to help them deploy capability faster and deliver quicker return on investment.
“Whilst we're not specifically building software products, we are developing a lot of AI workflows, AI models and AI accelerators that enable us to deliver quicker speed to value for our customers in our deployments,” he told techpartner.news.
“In the way we deploy our enterprise platforms, whether that be ServiceNow, Workday, TechnologyOne or some of the Microsoft platforms that we support with customers - within specific environments, be that the local government, critical infrastructure, utility or asset industry, we've built models that allow us to deploy those platforms at less than half of the time frame that would traditionally take to deploy platforms in those environments and configured to the requirements and needs of those industries.”
Aiming for 30% growth
Looking ahead to future M&A activity, Gowland said xAmplify has a broader ambition to become an ANZ business as part of its three-year strategy, recently hiring capability and skills into New Zealand.
“We've grown quite well over the eight years [since we started], and organically we're growing at about 30% year on year, and the [Accelerate] acquisition increases that growth for us every year to about 40% to 45% growth," he explained.
"We'd like to maintain a 30% growth over the next couple of years.
“We expect largely to be able to achieve that organically, and certainly we want to take a little bit of time to really now integrate the Accelerate business and really consolidate that business.”
.jpg&h=142&w=230&c=1&s=1)
