Fusion5 acquired three companies last year to strengthen its reputation and maintain its growth momentum
During a busy 2024, Fusion5 picked up New Zealand-based GoCloud Systems in June, IntegrationWorks in July and Optimum.consulting in October.
Speaking to ARN, Fusion5 Australia CEO Sven Martin said all three of the businesses were integrated into the fold swiftly.
“Our approach to integration is we do them quite quickly. A big part of the value that comes from acquisitions is there’s some great clients there, but also the talent behind that’s been supporting those clients,” he said.
“So, integrating them seamlessly and quickly into our business is critical because we want to bring them in; we want them to feel part of our business and culture and how we do things. Then, we want to take the value out to customers.”
Martin said the teams from all three businesses have been connected to Fusion5 and their product offerings are all part of how it goes to market, which includes integration, AI, data, business application and managed services.
This process differs from what the CEOs sees in acquisitions made by other companies, which he said has the acquired businesses run alongside its new owner “for a long time” and takes a while before any integration takes place.
“We’ve always been day one. We’re all together and we get going,” he said.
Last year wasn’t Fusion5’s first acquisition rodeo either, with it acquiring several companies over the years, including Dynamics Group in 2019, Topaz Solutions in 2021, Empyreal Solutions in 2022 and Liberate I.T and Vigilant.IT in 2023.
“When we’re doing acquisitions, we make sure that one of the key elements that’s aligned is our culture [which] is a big part of Fusion5,” Martin said.
“It’s how we deliver, how we bring all the passion of what we do to our customers. That’s a key thing we check off as part of our M&A [merger and acquisition] criteria. It’s pretty critical.
“I don’t think there’s any challenges. It’s just a lot of work. You’ll have your surprises, you’ll find out things that you didn’t expect, but on the whole, we address those. If there’s customer challenges, we get them sorted.”
As part of Fusion5’s acquisition process, Martin said that “from day one, they will feel connected to Fusion5”.
The first month is when the systems integrator’s (SI) onboarding happens, with the system transfer and customer migration process happening relatively quickly.
“There’s a lot of pre-work that we do to make sure it’s ready and then from pretty much day one, that team is connected and operating in our framework,” Martin added.
Home and away
This year is all about Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) for Fusion5, with a particular focus on honing its integration offerings.
In addition, the SI also offers its customers business applications services like enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), payroll and human resources (HR) solutions.
Additionally, it provides managed services across ICT, infrastructure and security.
All of these offerings are then looped together, so customers can come to Fusion5 for a wide variety of needs. However, it’s not just a matter of diversifying out of a desire to offer more but because these services aren’t operating in a vacuum.
This then comes to AI, Martin added, as it has the potential to embed itself everywhere.
“You have to pull all this together to really maximise the value you can extract from agentic AI and AI agents,” he said.
However, just because Fusion5 is focusing on A/NZ, that doesn’t mean the SI isn’t looking to expand further abroad – far from it.
While he declined to go into details, Martin highlighted the SI’s goal of expanding globally, as it already is doing work on an international scale.
Of particular note is the UK, which Martin previously referred to when Fusion4 acquired IntegrationWorks, stating at the time of the deal announcement that in the long-term, it would “make further inroads into the UK market”.
“We’ve got a number of customers in the UK that have got full rollouts of their ERP footprints. So, we’re already doing that,” he said.
“Right now, what I’d say is there’s plans to mature that and then take that further abroad, and that’ll come in our strategic sites.
“We’ve got a number of customers where we’ve got teams that do go-lives around Europe, but they tend to be local organisations that have got a global footprint.”
Getting sweet with NetSuite
One of Fusion5’s significant technology vendors is NetSuite and its parent company, Oracle, with the former being considered a key partner by martin after maintaining a 16-year partnership.
“They support us really well with marketing funds. They’re creative in terms of new initiatives or programs that they try and bring to market to help us overcome certain challenges,” he said.
“It seems to be a very reciprocal relationship. We know each other’s space as well, we’ve got a good respect for that and we’ve built on that to make the partnership work, because we don’t want to go where we can’t be successful, and they don’t want the partner to go where they can’t be successful.”
That goodwill is also particularly felt with Oracle, which Martin added is “one of true partnership”.
“They understand our capability really well. I think we complement them in terms of their capability and how they have their resources,” he said.
