Top 100 accounting and business consulting firm Moss Adams announced it has agreed to combine with boutique IT consulting firm Curtis Consulting Group (CCG) to expand the firm’s IT consulting and software development capabilities.
Issaquah, Wash.-based CCG offers services in business process improvement and business process automation and develops custom solutions that integrate these processes and technology. The solutions include operational business applications with connections to large enterprise-wide systems like SAP and People Soft.
The merger will bring CCG’s professionals into Moss Adams’ IT consulting practice, creating a team of 45 to be led by CCG founder Mark Curtis in the role of partner. The team’s expertise as programmers and project managers was especially attractive to Moss Adams, which ranked No. 15 in Accounting Today’s Top 100 Firms with $429 million in annual revenue. Tom Krippaehne, managing partner of Moss Adams Advisory Services and director of the IT consulting group, helped initiate the eight-month process of combining the firms based on his relationship with Curtis.
“It’s a big opportunity we see to build out our cybersecurity capabilities,” said Moss Adams chairman and CEO Chris Schmidt, explaining that CCG’s expertise will augment the firm’s current services in IT security assessments and penetration testing. “And with clients, to make their systems talk together better—most middle-market clients are fighting that fight. Then downstream we can build up our cybersecurity practice.”
The CCG team will work symbiotically with Moss Adams’ various practice leaders, Schmidt explained, especially the firm’s healthcare and financial services practices requiring greater security and privacy compliance. Across all industries, Schmidt expects the team’s capabilities in systems integration and business processes to meet current client demands.
“I don’t think there’s a client dealing with consumers that doesn’t have a concern about cybersecurity,” Schmidt said. “What we need to do, is make sure we listen to clients and scale the services we provide to them, based on the size of their business, but it runs the full gamut of clients.”
“Moss Adams and CCG people operate similarly in terms of behavior, collaboration and service delivery,” Curtis said in a statement. “I’m looking forward to combining forces and having more resources available to meet our client needs, as well as engaging with a new set of interesting and dynamic organizations.”
