We often collaborate with other consultancies on projects and sometimes those collaborations can highlight the journey that we’ve been on over the last few years and the fundamental shift that is happening in the way that businesses use technology.
Just over a year ago we started working with Deloitte Consulting on a series of projects and in contrast with many of their large consulting peers we found their philosophy and outlook to be refreshingly aligned with ours. They share our views on rapid delivery of real customer value using innovative technologies and business models. It was frankly a delight to find an organization that had started in a very different place and drawn the same conclusions about how to best foster innovation in the local landscape.
In parallel, Sixtree was on an impressive growth curve. We’ve been more than doubling every year in just about every metric that matters. But growth can be a blessing and a challenge. We were starting to feel the limits of rapid organic growth and knew that some structural changes were neeeded in order for Sixtree to reach its potential.
The natural answer was for Deloitte and Sixtree to join forces in more than just partnership and today we announce that the Sixtree team will be joining Deloitte Consulting to form the core of a brand new unit called platform engineering.
We’re very excited about this move because it validates our approach and provides the resources for us to grow our practices, philosophies and influence. We are extremely pleased to become part of Deloitte Consulting.
Platform engineering is our new moniker because we strongly believe that Australian and New Zealand businesses need to reinvent themselves as platform businesses. Whether reinvention creates an overt external platform, or an internal platform—the platform architecture is a critical enabler for businesses that need to compete in an environment of constant change.
Platforms are enablers. Platforms are a level surface which provide stability, reliability and a foundation upon which value can be created. Platforms are a standard upon which things can be built and activities performed.
Platform engineering is all about bringing together fundamental building blocks to provide a stable, uniform, high level base upon which to build a business. Engineering is all about our technical expertise in this endeavour. Our belief is that architecture is crucial to building a stable platform. That platforms must be robust and reliable. That platforms last for decades while the “superstructure” continually changes.
Platforms are an old idea (hence the industrial resonance) and a brand new idea which involves openness, collaboration, assembly and change.
This is why we are happy to be joining Deloitte and to call ourselves platform engineers for the 21st century.