Maven Wave Partners recently acquired Triton-Tek, a long-time developer of internet, mobile, and collaborative solutions with headquarters in Chicago and development operations in India. What follows is a Q&A regarding the acquisition, Maven Wave’s strategy, and why we think this deal is great for clients.
How does the acquisition of Triton-Tek fit with Maven Wave’s growth strategy?
Maven Wave’s core strategy from its founding in 2008 has been to provide strategy-led results-driven management, technology, and outsourcing solutions to companies that seek to improve operating performance. That means our responsibility to clients is to apply our skills in management and technology to the task of innovation. No market force in the last 50 years has been more powerful than innovation. The proportion of GDP growth attributable to innovation has grown from 35% at the birth of business computing in the 70s, to 80% over the last decade.
These improvements in productivity have largely been driven by (a) the automation of routine tasks through computerization, and (b) the movement of tasks that can not be automated to low cost labor markets. Its our view that the advent of the cloud computing model promises to again offer substantial increases in worker productivity, at considerably lower cost by increasing automation and easing the movement of units of work to low cost labor markets. In short, increasing the liquidity of computing.
In 2010, Maven Wave Partners became a Google Enterprise partner as clients began moving capabilities to the cloud computing model. Our experience with clients over 2010 and 2011 has shown us that the market is hungry for the lower cost, ubiquitous infrastructure offered by cloud solutions such as Google Enterprise. Often times a client has existing applications that take advantage of existing infrastructure such as Microsoft, or Lotus Notes, that must be replaced or eliminated. Even more often, there are new opportunities made possible by the cloud platform that make business sense, but require application development to execute. These applications are social, collaborative, and mobile in nature, as business people expect the apps they use at work to be as easy to use as Facebook.
Triton-Tek has been a long-time developer of internet, mobile, and collaborative solutions in Chicago. We were already working together on a number of client assignments. By acquiring Triton-Tek’s skills and experience combined with the offshore development capacity, Maven Wave was able to hit the fast forward button. It just made sense to buy rather than build.
How does Triton-Tek’s Microsoft practice fit in to the Maven Wave story?
Maven Wave is, by design, a firm with diverse skills. Our core consulting business has been the engine of our growth since the founding. Our clients include asset managers, broker/dealers, and other financial institutions who benefit from our experience and knowledge of middle and back office trading operations and systems. We assist health care companies with electronic lab notebook deployment and analytics. Our consultants are helping the world’s most well known brands in areas such as customer intimacy and customer analytics. Those examples are only a taste of what we can do. While our skills may be diverse, the uniting definition of our work is that we serve clients where business and technology opportunities intersect.
Our interest in the cloud (and in Google Apps), stems from our belief that cloud isn’t just technology, its a game changing business opportunity and a fundamental shift in the way computing is delivered, paid for, and deployed. The enabling condition for unlocking this shift is the replacement of existing on-premise messaging infrastructure with cloud-based infrastructure.
Reflecting on the progress of technology markets, we see an analogy that seems instructive for today. Microsoft released Exchange in 1996 with effectively zero market share (although they had predecessor Microsoft Mail in the market). By 2003, MS-Exchange owned 53% of the market and today they own roughly 65% of the market. How did they do it? They made a good product, at a lower cost, that better integrated with other products. A powerful (and obviously winning) combination. Google’s introduction of Google Apps at a lower cost than either Microsoft or Lotus Notes, with compelling integration between productivity apps (such as documents, spreadsheets and presentations) and the messaging infrastructure, is Microsoft’s mid-90s strategy redux.
Gartner has forecast that cloud messaging will have 55% of the market by 2020. Today, Google has captured 50% of the cloud mail market. So cloud messaging is likely to be a growth market and since Google started from scratch, it stands to reason that they are likely to be the fastest grower. That said, today Google still only represents 1% of the overall messaging market. Microsoft is the dominant player, and a choice that many companies will make again and again. From the messaging infrastructure, flows the platform choices corporations make for application development and as we discussed in a previous question, we see this as a big growth area as well. Whichever platform a client chooses, Maven Wave’s job is to create business value through technology.
Triton-Tek’s skills and experience on the Microsoft tool set will be valuable both to clients who are happy on their current infrastructure, or who plan to take advantage of Microsoft’s move to the cloud, as well as for clients that move to a lower cost, born-in-the-cloud solution like Google Apps.
Why is this a good thing for the clients of both companies?
Clients will benefit from this merger in two primary ways. First, the two companies have complementary skills that, when combined, allow us to provide clients with an end to end solution from the conception of an idea through technology delivery in the cloud across a broad range of industries. At the end of the day, clients hire consultants for the quality and commitment of the people that work on their projects. Maven Wave’s consultancy has focused primarily on assisting clients with first identifying business, technology, and operational improvements, then defining transformation programs, and finally leading those transformation efforts by combining business, process, and technology concerns into a single chain of execution. Triton-Tek’s strength begins once an application opportunity has been defined and must be executed with industry leading tools and technologies at compelling cost and quality. Working together, the combined company can attack a broader array of business challenges with a more diverse set of skills and abilities.
The second way that clients will benefit from the merger is through more cost effective solutions. Our ability to combine Big-4 style front end consulting (minus the attitude) with leading edge onshore/offshore development capacity will allow us to offer lower cost blended teams to companies that seek the benefits of lower cost labor markets.
Our team could not be more excited about the opportunities we see to serve clients in the future.
Is Maven Wave becoming an offshore outsourcing company?
There is no denying that offshore has become a routine part of the information technology landscape. In general, the offshore market has focused on large scale application maintenance and, in the past 5 years, an increasing focus on new development for large scale applications. Said differently, its a volume business fueled by young college grads in India and China.
Maven Wave does not seek to compete for this sort of volume outsourcing business. One of the things that attracted us to Triton-Tek is their focus on hand-picked talent. We believe there is an opportunity to deliver customized onshore/offshore teams with the same kind of talent selectivity that Maven Wave has always insisted on in its on-site consultants, but in an offshore environment. More to the point, we seek quality over quantity.
For more information you can also review our press release. Thanks for reading and please don’t hesitate to contact us direct for any reason.