Tria Federal's path in the middle tier centers on 2 core markets
Tim Borchert has led the midsized technology and advisory services company since its launch. Courtesy of Tria Federal.
By
Ross Wilkers
The Sagewind Capital-backed company is acquiring Softrams and undertaking a reorganization to set itself up for the future, as Tria Federal's chief executive explains.
Tria Federal is zeroing in on federal health and public safety in its push to be a go-to, midsized provider of digital transformation and advisory services across the market.
By acquiring Softrams, Tria is also looking to make itself into a more vertically-integrated company whose business units blend technical offerings and knowledge-centric work for agencies on their digital transformation paths.
Softrams adds 650 employees to the Tria workforce that now stands at approximately 1,500 people. Financial terms of the transaction announced Tuesday were not disclosed.
Close to 80% of Tria’s portfolio is now in federal health with Softrams now in the fold, Tria’s chief executive Tim Borchert told WT. That client base includes military and veteran health, along with support for public health agencies like the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Borchert said CMS is Softram’s largest customer. Other major clients include the departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Labor.
The other 20% is in public safety, but Tria is like many technology contractors in how it looks for common themes and categories of demand across its customer sets. Even as each agency has its own unique mission and requirements.
“We have agile methodologies that will span into other agencies that we believe we can be effective in, and we can add value to move their missions forward in their modernization journey down,” Borchert said. “It comes down to really understanding the depth of each program office, understanding their individual challenges and being able to provide solutions that actually fit something, not come in with a pre-packaged commercial off-the-shelf solution.”
Borchert explained that the integration of Softram is taking place amid an ongoing corporate reorganization into three customer-facing segments: military and veteran health, public health and public safety.
Tria is also standing up five service lines that span all three units amid the company’s work to find commonalities across its clients: results management, integrated health optimization, next-generation analytics and data management, financial transformation, and digital modernization.
“We are looking to take capabilities as horizontals that will feed into each one of the verticals, but the verticals will be more market-based,” Borchert said.
Then there is how Tria approaches digital modernization and particularly through how it looks to provide agencies a combination of technology integration, implementation and consulting/advisory offerings.
Much of that can be seen in how Tria embraces its status as a company squarely in the market’s middle tier, a vast and opaque part of the landscape that means it regularly competes against large businesses without being able to bid for set-aside contracts.
Acquiring Softrams and its base of contracts, some of which have been active for two decades, is a step Borchert sees as bringing Tria more scale and “significant depth” in areas like software development and human-centered design.
Softrams also appears to be the template for how Tria will look at future acquisitions.
“The type of acquisitions that we're looking at moving forward are certainly much more sophisticated, much more mature in nature, and they are really able to start contributing and complimenting us on day one,” Borchert said.
Tria’s private equity owner is Sagewind Capital, which formed the company in the spring of 2023 out of three prior acquisitions. Federal Advisory Partners came first in 2022, then the additions of FavorTech Consulting and Universal Consulting Services followed.
Sagewind certainly is there to help Tria on the financial and investment fronts, but Borchert also pointed out the other aspects of what the PE firm brings to the equation.
Given Sagewind’s near-exclusive concentration on government, no explanations are needed on the market’s unique fabric and characteristics such as contract delays and protests.
Borchert also gets to meet with executives of the other portfolio companies at Sagewind Symposiums, which have taken place for each of the past two years. Sagewind currently backs eight companies in the market, including Tria.
“We sit for a day, we do breakouts, we share best practices, we share some of our challenges and how we overcame them,” Borchert said. “It really helps to understand where each company is in their journey, get together, celebrate and share in a very comfortable environment.”