How consulting firms acquire to iterate, and sometimes reinvent themselves

One major theme emerges when looking at how contractors that do consulting approach acquisitions in the market: they look to buy companies that are not really consulting businesses.

Instead, they tend to look for tech-oriented businesses and use those acquired assets as a means to augment the historical consulting and professional services core.

That is what we often refer to at WT as the intersection of consulting, integration and implementation. The idea is to blend tech skills with everything a company knows about an agency’s mission and inner workings.

Our 2024 roundup of mergers and acquisitions in the government market puts that theme into focus, but there is a good amount of history to revisit as the definition of consulting seems to change all the time.

For Accenture’s U.S. federal subsidiary, its series of acquisitions over many years prior to the Cognosante buy is part of that conversation. Especially when considering that Accenture Federal Services’ purchase of Novetta in 2022 created an essentially new national security business, just like how Cognosante has in the health domain.

Booz Allen Hamilton’s tech focus became prominent again through its acquisition of PAR Government Systems, a move aimed at beefing up prototyping work for defense agencies. 

Booz Allen's purchase of Liberty IT Solutions in 2021 was both a company record at $725 million and all about tech, the latter of which was also true in the $250 million buy of Aquilent in 2016.

It is long past time to retire the word “pivot” in describing how Booz Allen has pushed for more tech skills, given the origins trace back to the Vision 2020 blueprint unveiled in 2013 and the current VoLT vision first revealed in 2021.

CGI Federal’s evolution to be more tech-oriented dates back two decades and returned to the forefront with its purchase of Aeyon. That path for CGI Federal also includes its 2021 purchase of Array, which was preceded by the 2020 addition TeraThink and 2019 acquisition of Sunflower Systems.

Deloitte would argue it moved closer to tech via its purchase of the CasePointer disease surveillance business. This team develops open source software to help public health agencies work with epidemiological data.

One of the first stories I wrote for WT back in the spring of 2017 was in fact a tech-focused acquisition by Deloitte, which bought cloud consulting provider Day1 Solutions. Many more followed and preceded that one of course.

Ernst & Young would say the same with its purchase of Dignari, a digital identity and access management technology consulting firm that uses prototyping and data science techniques.

Then there is LMI, which was born as a logistics enterprise in 1961 and remains very much focused on helping government agencies bolster how they move people and resources around the world.

LMI entered a new era in mid-2022 when three private investment firms acquired the company. In the early part of 2024, LMI used that backing to purchase digital transformation specialist JJR.

Cadmus is also part of the mix with its buy in the fall of Ventera, which is now the acquirer’s technology business.