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KPMG’s Australian member firm has announced plans to buy Chartertech, a local competitor with about 140 employees.

The deal’s value was not disclosed. 

Canberra-based Chartertech has a similar business model as KPMG. Its first major source of revenue is a business unit that provides accounting services to Australian firms. Chartertech also has an IT consulting practice that helps clients implement enterprise software products, particularly those used for financial tasks such as predicting revenue. 

The latter business unit was likely the main motivation behind KPMG Australia’s decision to swoop in. Over the past two years, the Big Four firm has bought several IT consultancies focused on products from large software vendors such as Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. With the acquisition of Chartertech, KPMG can add another prominent enterprise technology supplier to the list: IBM.

Chartertech helps companies implement IBM analytics tools such as Cognos and TM1 Planning Analytics. The former product, which traces its roots back more than three decades, is a business intelligence tool for crunching business data. TM1 Planning Analytics has a similar focus. It’s used by corporate finance teams for data processing tasks such as generating revenue forecasts based on historical sales information.

Cognos and TM1 Planning Analytics are both among the oldest brands in the enterprise software world. According to Chartertech’s website, its consultancies also help clients adopt newer IBM products such as Cloud Pak for Data. This is a software bundle that combines Cognos with a number of complementary tools for tasks such as removing errors from a company’s databases. 

Chartertech’s services menu extends beyond the IBM ecosystem as well. Notably, it helps companies implement the namesake ERP platform of Brisbane-based TechnologyOne. The latter firm isn’t particularly well known outside Australia, but ranks as the country’s largest software-as-a-service provider and counts many local businesses as customers. 

KPMG Australia expects to close the acquisition in November. Chartertech co-founding George Skillin and Michael McRoberts are set to join the Big Four firm as partners. 

Skillin commented in a prepared statement that “we began with just seven staff in 2017 and following a period of rapid growth, we are excited to be entering our next phase as part of a global professional services firm.”

KPMG executive Naomi Mitchell, in turn, shared an explainer of the rationale behind the deal. “Tech transformation is the number one area of demand for mid-market clients and it’s incredibly hard to access this talent,” she said. “Coming together in this way makes great sense for both organisations.”

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