AWS Premier Partner Effectual Buys Five Talent, An App Modernization Specialist
The Premier AWS partner launched last year by the Datapipe founding team is growing fast and now has added cloud-native development to its skillset with its second acquisition.
Effectual is a relatively new force in the channel, but the AWS Premier Partner has now completed its second acquisition with a deal for Five Talent, an app modernization specialist it had previously partnered with.
Buying the Bend, Oregon-based consultancy enables Effectual, based in Hoboken, N.J., to deliver cloud and security services across every facet of the modern IT lifecycle, Effectual CEO Robb Allen told CRN.
The deal closed Monday at an undisclosed price.
Five Talent specializes in cloud-native app development, app modernization, and DevOps transformations. That’s a practice highly complementary to Effectual’s—over the last year the companies have brought each other in on several projects combining refactoring applications and ongoing managed services, Allen said.
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Five Talent also brings AWS Mobile and SaaS competencies into the mix, and that’s “something we’ll be capitalizing on,” Allen said.
Founded in early 2019 by the team behind Datapipe, a cloud hosting and managed services powerhouse bought by Rackspace in 2017, Effectual has been scaling rapidly in the AWS ecosystem.
But the company took a different path from Datapipe—forgoing data centers and a Microsoft practice. The startup exclusively focused on AWS, and later specialized in delivering VMware Cloud on AWS environments.
Fueled by $50 million in funding from two private equity firms, Effectual late last year acquired JHC Technology, a specialist in offering managed Amazon cloud services to government agencies that's based in National Harbor, Md.
With both its acquisitions, Effectual will now be in a strong position to bring Five Talent’s cloud-native development capabilities to the public sector, CMO Richard Dolan told CRN.
“And we still have powder left in keg for future acquisitions,” Dolan said. Coming deals will be driven by geographic reach and service capabilities.
Effectual’s prior DevOps practice focused on best practices, processes and documentation.
“There’s a big difference between that and actually being able to do the work,” Allen said. With Five Talent, Effectual will be able to deliver full-stack modernization services.
“There’s really not a missing capability across our stack now and a missing piece of the journey we can’t take the customer on, going from the data center to the cloud,” he said.
That’s the goal the company was always aiming for, Allen said, adding, “we definitely got there a little faster than we thought we would.”
Five Talent, founded in 2004, has roughly 45 employees in Bend and Portland, Oregon, bringing Effectual’s total headcount to around 150. The merger will see that staff remain and likely grow in its Oregon offices.
The region, a hotbed of tech talent, is a good place for recruiting, Allen told CRN.