Deloitte has made moves to bolster its business analytics play, picking up Australian business insights specialist Pathfinder Solutions.
The acquisition will increase Deloitte's analytics and information management practice headcount by 15 to 170 as all of Pathfinder's staff across Melbourne, Sydney and New Zealand transition to the new owner.
Deloitte CEO Giam Swiegers, who heads up the firm's global analytics push, said the company was now the "largest business-centric data analytics and information management provider in Australia".
"As a firm we have been making investments in understanding how to work with analytics since 2002," Swiegers told CIO. "We have quite a big dream of what we can build for ourselves in the data and data analytics space. Pathfinder is one that gives us more breadth rather than more depth.
"It adds to us offerings of IP and content that we just haven't had before. We have discovered that these forensics boys, if they work with subject experts in market segmentation, in marketing strategies they can really make a difference. So Pathfinder is a natural fit for us."
Pathfinder founding director, David McCloskey told CIO the company had been approached by several interested acquirers, but his staff were pleased with the Deloitte offer.
"One of the keys for us is in the Pathfinder Solutions business over the past four or five years we were approached two or three times a year," he said. "We find it quite difficult to get alignment on two or three key things and fundamentally what kind of compensation they were offering. So what kind of culture and career path they were offering. I think there is a very strong synergy between the culture we have and Deloitte has along with the career path with the size and scale of the organisation."
The value of the acquisition was not revealed and the go to market strategy, including whether the Pathfinder brand is retained, will be decided in future.
Deloitte operates a Sydney-based Technology and Innovation Centre – built to forensic standards – to host its own data sets used in its analytics offerings and customers', should they so desire. It has similar facilities across the world.
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