Deloitte acquires Melbourne IT integrator

Deloitte has acquired Melbourne-headquartered enterprise integrator Sixtree to form the basis of a new engineering platform unit within the audit firm's technology advisory practice.

The value of the deal was not disclosed.

Sixtree was founded in 2010 by Ben Wylie, Brett Wilson and Yamen Sader. When the acquisition becomes official on August 1, 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.

"[Sixtree staff] enable generally older businesses that have become rigid, and even trapped, by outdated, unintegrated technology systems to become ‘younger’ and more agile by wrapping digital applications and new technologies into an adaptable platform to meet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 in a statement.

"[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 in a statement.

Sixtree specialises in technologies from MuleSoft, Red Hat, Elastic and AWS. The company said 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.

Last July it took over Sydney Oracle partner Dataweave. The following September it acquired another Oracle reseller, Qubit Consulting, and took over Melbourne-based Cloud Solutions Group in November. Deloitte also formed an alliance with social analytics firm Digivizer.

Deloitte Consulting managing partner Robert Hillard said the Sixtree buy was another strategic 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.