Five Talent, a technology consultancy and custom software modernization and development firm headquartered in Bend, has announced that it is now an Effectual company — an innovative, cloud-first managed and professional services provider based in Hoboken, New Jersey.
The acquisition provides a powerful opportunity for both companies to combine expertise and deliver a full suite of services to customers on their IT modernization journey. “We’ve had many people approach us to acquire Five Talent over the years, but it was never a good fit. Lots of people wanted to buy us, but for the wrong reasons,” said Preston Callicott, CEO of Five Talent. “Effectual really recognized the value we have built and the reputation we have for excellent application builds.”
The two companies began working together as Five Talent clients needed help in maintaining the applications that were built by Callicott and his team. “As application developers, we have people who want us to manage their cloud infrastructure for them. We did it, but we were reluctant, because we are not a data center group,” he said. “I started reaching out to several managed services providers (MSPs), including Effectual, to assist clients with this. Effectual’s team came from well-known, first-class MSPs, so we started giving them small clients, and they did a great job. Then we started giving them bigger clients. We found that their cultures, morals and ethics matched ours perfectly.” He added, “They are just good people. Working together over the past year, it is clear that the cultural similarities of our organizations and our complementary services provide customers with a complete solution for delivering successful business outcomes.”
Callicott said the companies started discussing a deeper relationship last July, and then started talking in earnest about merging in early December 2019. “Then we decided to allow them to acquire us, and have been working on the merger for the past four to five months,” he said. Upon the announcement of the merger, Callicott said all of Five Talent’s clients are very happy about the pairing. “Five Talent remains the same. Ryan (Comingdeer, CTO of Five Talent) and I are here to stay and to build the business. Clients will see a lot more resources, but we are the same company we were last Friday.”
Five Talent collaborates with customers to design, develop and architect applications built using DevOps methodologies that integrate best practices and drive innovation. “We are committed to building trusted, long-term relationships with our customers in every engagement,” said Callicott. “Similarly, Effectual approaches each engagement with a thorough understanding of each customer’s goals and success criteria. The alignment in our approach, and shared passion to learn and innovate alongside our customers, has inspired us to set new goals and grow our businesses as one.”
“Effectual and Five Talent have been working as partners on a number of engagements with our mutual customers,” said Robb Allen, CEO of Effectual. “Simply put, we believe we can accomplish more together as one company, delivering a complete suite of services for modernizing, securing and ensuring the continuous compliance of mission-critical applications and workloads for our customers. We will leverage our combined experience, resources, skill sets and geographic reach to continue to execute on our vision to be the leader in IT modernization services for commercial enterprises and the public sector.”
Five Talent has extensive experience in DevOps automation, custom application development, SaaS enablement and refactoring workloads. The company’s expertise in cloud-native services, including containers and serverless, enhance Effectual’s portfolio of professional and modern cloud-managed services. Five Talent holds Amazon Web Services (AWS) DevOps, SaaS and Mobile Competencies and recently surpassed the AWS 50 Certified milestone within the AWS Partner Network, placing them among the most technically experienced Advanced Consulting Partners in the AWS partner ecosystem. At a minimum, every Five Talent team member is an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, ensuring a foundational understanding of the AWS Cloud architectural principles as well as basic security and compliance aspects of the AWS platform. In addition, 25 percent of the certifications achieved by the team are at the Professional or Specialty level, the most challenging and sought after of all AWS certifications.
As a result of the acquisition, Callicott said Five Talent is hiring, “We are staying in Bend. We were adamant about that. We’ll grow business here. We have already hired a couple new people, and are looking to hire ten to 11 more over the next month or so.” He said that Five Talent will expand beyond the west coast, and will look at opening offices anywhere Effectual has facilities, including Colorado, Washington, D.C. and New Jersey.
“Technical excellence and continuous learning are core values for both Effectual and Five Talent,” said Five Talent CTO Comingdeer. “Together, we can pursue greater levels of expertise and continue to push our team to advance their skills. The certifications, competencies and programs we have achieved through our partnership with AWS demonstrate this commitment and provide customers with the confidence that we are cloud experts who can deliver high-performing, impactful solutions.”
Combining Effectual’s certified Modernization Engineers with the certified expertise of the Five Talent team puts the company at more than 150 AWS certifications. Effectual is the only AWS Premier Consulting Partner to hold both the AWS Government Competency and the VMware Master Services Competency in VMware Cloud on AWS.
FiveTalent.com • effectual.com
