Xantus has offices in Cheshire and London, and recorded income of £16 million in 2010/11.

KPMG strengthens its CIO advisory capability through acquisition of Xantus

LONDON — KPMG announced the purchase of Xantus, one of the leading independent management consultancies in the UK specialising in IT advisory services. Xantus is recognised in the market for the quality of the work it delivers to a range of top tier clients – as evidenced by being double winners at the 2011 MCA Awards for IT Consultant of the Year and Strategy Project of the Year.

By broadening KPMG’s advisory capabilities, the deal will enable KPMG to better support its clients, at both Board and CIO level.

Xantus has offices in Cheshire and London, and recorded income of £16 million in 2010/11. It works with a wide range of clients, including many FTSE 100 and equivalent organisations in the UK and overseas, across the private and public sector.

Commenting on the deal, Bryan Cruickshank, Head of IT Advisory in KPMG’s Management Consulting practice, said: “We are delighted to announce this deal. Our focus is on continually improving the quality and breadth of consulting advice that we can bring to our clients, and this acquisition will help us achieve that goal. Xantus is a leading player with top class credentials and an impressive client portfolio. We believe there is a great fit between KPMG and Xantus in terms of calibre of people and of clients, and a sense of shared values. Together, we can bring our clients insights that genuinely help them achieve their goals.”

Steve Watmough, CEO of Xantus, said: “We are very excited to be joining KPMG. It is a great development for the company, our staff and our clients. This deal represents a significant opportunity to accelerate the delivery of what has always been the Xantus vision – to become the leading advisor to the CIO community. Combining Xantus’ track record with KPMG’s global brand, reputation and scale offers a very powerful proposition.”

Source:  www.top-consultant.com

As the economy pulls out of recession, one of the themes—or contradiction—that is emerging is the need to drive growth and transformation projects while still maintaining stringent controls on costs.

Nowhere is this more the case than in the battered and soon-to-be-battered financial services industry and public sector. But, as Steve Watmough, CEO of independent management consultancy Xantus argues, a renewed focus on IT as a source of opportunity rather than cost, can help to square this circle.

Take the financial sector.

“Banks are still piloting a way out the changes, there’s a big appetite to improve and change and to drive out the value of merged organisations,” he says. “They have identified that IT is one of the biggest contributors to merger benefits and also one that you can wrap your hands around.”

Whereas banks would in the past try to “absorb” IT change, they now see it as a platform for growth:

“There are a lot of costs and opportunities in IT, so that looking at the cost of IT at the start and what it can contribute in the longer term is a major factor in what companies are prepared to bid for organisations.”

Watmough argues that for some businesses “IT is the heart of the organisation,” where the CIO effectively—and sometimes formally—is the COO.

“The biggest challenge for the global CIO is to have key people in their organisations with the range of business and technical skills to be able to adequately discuss with business colleagues what they need and translate that into IT solutions,” he says. “On the one side there’s a need for a complex technological engineering solution, on the other a pure business conversation.”

Because good IT people tend to come from technical backgrounds they often lack the ability to “sell” the need for IT solutions to the wider business, says Watmough:

“The CIO has got to be able to sell—no matter how good you are if no-one is selling, nothing happens.”

In organisations where the CIO has managed to establish a high profile, IT is less likely to be seen as a “single cost” to be managed downwards.

“Fewer people are saying they need to do less IT, more are talking about how to make IT more effective, possibly even spend more if they get good value,” he says.

He is hoping this perception will prevail in the public sector, where the emphasis at the moment is on cost reduction.

“In the short term we are going to see a reduction in expenditure, but hopefully once that’s stabilised we will get to move the thing forward,” he says. “Whatever the perception of IT has been in the past, it must be part of the solution in the future.”

The problem for CIOs, says Watmough, is “where are the brains to help us architect these solutions before we even go out to buy them, and then help us buy them effectively and avoid the problems we’ve had with buying systems in the past.”

This is of course where Xantus fits in. Started in 2000 at a point when, according to Watmough, “the people who provided advice were being subsumed into suppliers” and before the Big Four re-emerged as “client-side advisers,” the company carved out a niche providing specialist support to CIOs grappling with the challenges of running global organisations.

It goes to market through what Watmough calls a “crude grouping” into financial services, public sector and global—which covers all other sectors and some of the firm’s largest clients. By focusing the firm’s efforts in this way, he believes that they cannot only reassure clients that the advice they give is the best for them—and not the consulting organisation—but attract the best talent:

“Good people are able to describe what they don’t do as well as what they do do,” he says. “We interview people every day and have a 10:1 application to appointment ratio. The people who come to us want high quality work and have very high expectations. Part and parcel of that is giving them access to the best clients.”

Xantus’ headcount is currently about 70, but Watmough says the company has built the infrastructure to and the market position to more than double that:

“Some consultancies say they want to stay small, but how can you build an industry if you do that, how can you develop processes and methods,” he says. “We can’t rely on the big organisations to do that for us.”

He also believes that the IT advisory market is more than big enough to support that growth:

“We’re seeing just the tip of the iceberg at the moment when it comes to transforming organisations through the active use of IT at the moment,” he says. “We want to help organisations make high quality IT decisions—our aspiration is to be the number one adviser to the IT leadership community in the UK.”

Source:  Top-Consultant News