Digital Services Firm Argano Expands Planning, Forecast, Automation Services With Anavate Buy

‘We don't do distressed. We don't do “birds with broken wings.” We don't do fixer-uppers. We don't do that kind of stuff. It's high performing, well respected, high NPS, high-employee engagement companies that meet our standards. Because we're a high-performance company, we're moving too fast to do repair work, if you will,’ says Argano CEO Chip Register.

Digital services consultant Argano has acquired Anavate Partners, a fellow global consulting firm with a focus on cloud-based planning and forecasting.

The acquisition marks Plano, Texas-based Argano’s fourth acquisition since the start of the year, as well as its 20th acquisition since it was founded in 2020.

Anavate is in the planning space, said Argano CEO Chip Register.

“There's a lot of planning software in the world,” Register (pictured) told CRN. “It's more of a CFO-ish kind of thing. It's scenarios and consolidations around multiple entities, everything around how you plan the business. From an operational standpoint, how does the CFO talk to the COO about the financial plan, the business plan, the operating plan. There's lots of technology to do that. Supply chains is another. There are others as well. You'll see us add capability, after capability after capability in spaces that other companies can do, but they're just not good at. They don't have the size. I think our supply chain consulting business, by the end of this year, will be the largest in the world, bar nobody.

Prior to Anavate, Argano this year acquired three other companies:

On April 29, Argano unveiled the acquisition of Netlogistik, a 600-person strong strategic advisory and consulting firm specializing in digital supply chain technology.
On May 6, the company said it acquired Real Dynamics, a consulting and technology solution provider focused on large-scale Microsoft Dynamics implementations.
On May 13, Argano said it acquired Attentis Consulting, a Salesforce-focused solution provider focused on the healthcare vertical.

Register, who previously served as co-CEO of Publicis Sapient after it became a digital transformation-focused firm, said that experience showed him the value of bringing the marketing and data worlds together.

“Everybody's trying to get to the CEO,” he said. “But now the marketing world and the data world have collided. You need a full package to take to the world of digital business transformation of the 21st Century. You don't just have to take a company through a transformation. You have to take its brand, its clients, its experience design through a transformation. That's what Sapient was all about.”

After dealing with legacy clients worldwide, including every Fortune 500 client and almost every Global 2000 client in the world, Register said he learned that a company’s digital operating platform, including the technology stack, ERP, supply chain, workforce management, revenue lifecycle management, the service model, and so on needs to be modernized.

“It's all a bunch of legacy junk,” he said. “It's disintegrated technology, disintegrated data on old, sometimes on-prem, software. So we said, let's put a brand in the market that does nothing but the modernization of the digital operating platform independent from the digital experience platform, with the goal and the promise of letting the digital operating platform be an enabler of commercial innovation, an enabler of the digital experience platform, and not a limiter of it.”

Argano’s approach was to break the digital operating platform down into component specialties, including commerce, billing, order management, supply chain, procurement, logistics, warehouse management, transportation management, workforce management, modern finance, and any other specialties related to the operations field rather than the fulfillment side, and use that to look at what larger businesses need to be able to scale those components without the typical drop in customer satisfaction that comes with scale, Register said.

“There is an axiom that I think is true, which is at scale, customer satisfaction and employee experience drop,” he said. “It's probably correlated to scale, which is why you see very large companies with very mediocre customer satisfaction scores, and you see very small companies with ridiculously high customer satisfaction scores. It's not rocket science. Small companies do one thing. They do it very well. They do it over and over. They have very high-touch delivery and client engagement, all that kind of thing, and become specialists.”

Argano thinks it is possible to defeat the idea that scale is bad by finding the right specialists in specific solutions and the technologies behind them, including Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft, Databricks, Snowflake, ServiceNow, and so on, Register said.

Argano is doing that by bringing multiple boutique technology specialty firms under a single roof and unifying their capabilities and depth of delivery, he said.

“You want to be broad, you want to be deep, because you want to take on the big challenges, the big transformations, but you want to do it with quality,” he said. “And that quality comes from boutiques. Argano has already brought in 20 of those types of firms representing the spectrum of technologies and business solutions surrounding the digital operating platform. And we're very artful about the way that we integrate them, the way we get them to collaborate, the way we turn many into one where necessary, the way we sort of let people retain a lot of their own independence and what they do when it's not necessary.”

Integrating those boutique companies is how Argano has grown, Register said.

“We’re very artful with the idea of the integrations,” he said. “To misquote Shakespeare, the integration is the thing. And that's been our story. We've just acquired four companies in four weeks. So we're definitely on the move. We're going to be knocking on the door of a billion dollars of revenue this year. We're not a small company. We're up there.”

While there are thousands of integrators with service revenue of under $500 million, and some really big companies with service revenue of over $5 billion, there are few in that $500 million to $5 billion pocket, including companies like Perficient, Huron Consulting Group, Thoughtworks, West Monroe, Slalom, and Argano, Register said.

“It's a very uncrowded field,” he said. “That's where we are. We have this focus on things that we want to know better than anybody else. Nobody else characterizes their company as specialists in this. I love the uniqueness of our brand and positioning. We have a full set of capabilities for any technology or any componentry, and we can address it at scale and globally. We have people all over the world, and we really like where we are. We're growing well, and we're also adding all the time to fill out that mosaic, that nexus between business solutions and technology and industry.”

When Argano makes an acquisition, the acquired companies become a part of Argano without breaking the thing that makes them good, Register said. While some with a focus on Oracle, for instance, become part of Argano’s Oracle Business Unit, others doing something that nobody else does becomes a standalone practice inside Argano, he said. Clients are shared across the entire company.

“It's a journey,” he said. “The good news is, we ride on the rails of an 84 NPS [net promoter’s score], a great customer satisfaction score in an industry where the average is about 40. And we have maintained that over time. We've benchmarked that constantly.”

When it comes to its acquisition strategy, Argano looks at about 200 potential companies a year, Register said.

“It's kind of like getting into Harvard,” he said. “Maybe that's a bad analogy these days, but we start with 200 and winnow them down the pipeline to five or so that actually join, out of a class. Those we like we sign an NDA [non-disclosure agreement] and exchange data with probably half of those. We don't do distressed. We don't do ‘birds with broken wings.’ We don't do fixer-uppers. We don't do that kind of stuff. It's high performing, well respected, high NPS, high-employee engagement companies that meet our standards. Because we're a high-performance company, we're moving too fast to do repair work, if you will.”