Stephen Kowal (Atturra)
It’s been less than a year since the business formerly known as FTS Group picked up the mantle of Atturra. Now, the consultancy has its eyes set on digging its heels into the managed services space.
The rebrand took place in August 2021, with eight brands – Anatas, Veritec, Cubic Consulting, Esam Consulting, Galaxy42, KoBold, Mentum Systems and Noetic – all coming under the Atturra name to reduce confusion with clients across its multiple businesses.
After the rebrand, the Australian technology consulting and services business is set on investing more into its managed services offerings, according to its half year results for FY22, which were released in February after listing on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) in December 2021.
It already offers application managed services as a by-product of its existing work, Atturra CEO Stephen Kowal claimed, but the business is seeing a lot of demand for more managed services.
“What we're doing is we're putting investment in building and making that more a larger and consistent offering across all of our offerings,” he elaborated to ARN.
“So we can offer for our Boomi clients and Microsoft clients.
“We're not secretive about it. We're always continuously looking out for potential managed services acquisitions. It's got to be be the right size, price, scale as well.”
To get to this point of focusing on developing its managed services, Atturra had to first get through its rebranding.
In the early stages of the facelift, the business spent its time on engagement to get its new name and branding known, Kowal said. After that is when anxiety struck, with Kowal claiming the business spent weeks worrying over the possibility of things going wrong.
In the end however, this was all for naught.
“We over-worried about the impact,” he said. “We created and thought about issues that just never arose.
“This is going to sound silly, but branding is just important internally as externally. Clients, I think, aren't overly fussed about it; we were really worried about staff and identity.
“To be honest, someone else could say our whole brand really did look 1970s-ish. Our new brand does have that better feel and we spent money doing it properly. I think the staff love that. I've been amazed at the rebrand.”
Moving forward, Kowal said he would like to see the business build up the Atturra name and have it established as an Australian icon.
“I want to see even a better brand presence. If you look at all these countries around the world, you go to France, Capgemini is famous. You go to New Zealand, it's Datacom. You go to the US, it's IBM and Accenture.
“We don't actually have that in Australia. We don't have our own IT services and advisory organisation. That's where I want to be in five years. In the next year, I want to be closer to that goal.”
