ICF to acquire digital transformation, human-centered design specialist
By
Ross Wilkers
ICF identifies a second acquisition in as many months to further expand the technology consulting firm’s IT modernization and digital transformation work with federal agencies.
ICF has identified a second acquisition in as many months to further expand the technology consulting firm’s IT modernization and digital transformation work with federal agencies.
Fairfax, Virginia-headquartered ICF said Monday it agreed to purchase Creative Systems and Consulting and add nearly 270 people that include specialists in cloud-based applications such as ServiceNow, Salesforce, Appian and Microsoft’s platforms.
A regulatory filing puts the base purchase price at around $160 million, while ICF said in its release that Creative expects to end this year on $60 million revenue.
All parties expect the acquisition to close by the end of this year.
McLean-headquartered Creative was founded in 2010 and centers its services around digital strategy, cloud computing and infrastructure solutions, customer experience and data analytics.
The company particularly touts its core capability around human-centered design practices for software-as-a-service environments, or those where the software is licensed on a subscription basis and centrally hosted in a cloud infrastructure.
“We expect this acquisition (of Creative) to provide significant opportunities for revenue synergies over time as ICF now will offer leading practices supporting the most highly adopted low-code/no-code platforms in the federal government,” ICF CEO John Wasson said in a release.
Software-as-a-service is how low-code/no code platforms such as Salesforce get put to work for customers and that area of expertise led ICF to acquire Incentive Technology Group in early 2020.
Prior to Creative, ICF’s most recent acquisition was of Enterprise Science and Computing in November to add a company focused on helping clients in the health domain manage large sets of data.
ESAC also has a modernization component implied in its offerings given the company’s focus on interoperability between different health IT systems and applying technology into care delivery.
Baird acted as the exclusive financial adviser to Creative.