North Highlight’s latest acquisition is UTM360, a software and consulting firm based in Microsoft’s hometown of Bellevue, Washington.

North Highlight is one of the world’s largest midsize management consultancies. Its roughly 3,500 employees, who are spread across over 50 offices worldwide, help clients with tasks ranging from lowering procurement costs to setting up analytics dashboards.

UTM360 has a different focus. It’s a smaller company active mainly in the strategic portfolio management, or SPM, space.

SPM is a business term that describes the process by which a firm decides how much money to invest in what areas and when. That’s easier said than done in a large corporation where the IT, marketing and logistics teams are all pursuing multiple projects at the same time.

The main issue with figuring out where to invest and when is that it requires taking a very large number of business details into account. UTM360 sells an application that can bring all those business details together in one interface to make executives’ jobs easier.

UTM360 customers also have access to a what-if planning tool. It lets executives see what would happen if they were to invest their company’s budget in a certain way, then compare that strategy with alternative approaches.

The acquisition of UTM360 is North Highlands largest ever. That means the company sees a lot of revenue growth potential in the SPM market and was willing to pay a premium to unlock that opportunity.

Also notable is that software products like the ones UTM360 sells generally have higher margins than the professional services North Highlight provides. Put differently, the deal may enable the management consultancy improve its profitability.

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