Slalom extends APAC expansion to Wellington and Singapore
Global technology and business consultancy Slalom has been busy scaling up its Asia Pacific operations of late with a newly-installed senior team in Singapore and expansion to Wellington.
Recent weeks have seen Slalom add ex-Avanade director Varun Kumar and former IBM senior leader Callum Ide as ASEAN sales & go-to-market and partnership leads out of Singapore, along with senior principal and principal office recruits Keegan Davies and Astrid Lim.
Meanwhile, Slalom, which first arrived in New Zealand at the beginning of 2023, has bagged its first public sector client in Wellington, effectively paving the way for the global technology and business consultancy’s expansion into the Kiwi capital, with recruitment already underway.
New Zealand
Specifically, the firm has been seeking a locally-based client partner to help drive strategy and establish Slalom’s presence in the Wellington market as a member of its wider NZ growth team, which has already managed to build up to a 50-strong headcount in the country since launching on the back of Slalom’s earlier expansion into Australia as just its fourth international location.
“We’ve onboarded our first public sector client, and with that, Slalom NZ officially opens its doors in the capital,” said NZ GTM leader Christina Wells, who joined last year following a similar role for Aussie cloud consultancy LAB3. “This moment matters, because public sector work is different. It’s about people and purpose, and deserves consulting that’s as human as it is high-performing.”
Since its expansion into Australia, which notably coincided with the onset of the Covid-19 global pandemic, the US-headquartered firm has upped its footprint to a dozen countries worldwide, including Ireland, Germany and the Netherlands to complement its existing European base in the UK and more recent launches in Colombia and Mexico in South and Central America.
Singapore
Slalom has also been pursuing further expansion in the Asia Pacific under the guidance of regional leader Mike Shimota, who was elevated from his A/NZ country managing director role last April, with the firm now fully operational in Japan and presently gearing up its operations in Singapore – to which end Slalom has recently recruited a number of new senior leaders.
Varun Kumar and Callum Ide both cross from brief stints at Ukrainian-origin IT consultancy SoftServe, before which Kumar spent over a decade between Avanade (as head of Southeast Asia financial services) and HCLTech, and Ide seven years at IBM, latterly as Microsoft alliance lead out of Singapore after originally joining the tech giant in Canberra.
Additionally, Keegan Davies has also made the move from SoftServe, where he was an enterprise solutions principal, along with one-time Oliver Wyman consultant Astrid Lim, who brings further recent experience as a vice president at Barclays. Meanwhile, director and client partner Anish Eapen has been on the ground since last year, returning after an earlier stint at Slalom in the US and time at IBM.
Slalom’s global ramp-up after 20 years in business has been dramatic. The firm, founded in its present form in Seattle in 2001, first dipped its toes overseas a little over a decade ago with the office launch in London (followed by a move to Canada in 2016), boasting a headcount at the time of 3,000 professionals and takings around the $500 million mark. That figure today stands at over 13,000, bringing in $3 billion-plus in annual revenues, with a view to $5 billion by 2029.
