Acquisition-hungry efex acquires onPlatinum and Crowd IT

Ambitious middle-market managed services and advisory firm efex is continuing to splash the cash, adding another two providers – onPlatinum and Crowd IT – to its growing national stable.

Crowd IT is a healthcare sector IT services provider based in Melbourne, adding to efex’s recent purchase of Priority 1 and fellow health specialist Medihost Solutions in 2024, while ‘onPlatinum’ is the managed services division of ASX-listed Comms Group.

The two latest deals add to the seven efex has already made over the past couple of years, including Compusult in February, with the consultancy showing no signs of slowing down after having sold to private equity firm Advent Partners towards the end of last year.

onPlatinum

While efex has long adopted a ‘buy-and-build’ strategy, onPlatinum marks its largest acquisition to date; the deal worth up to $30 million after the Queensland-based company was bought by ICT cloud firm Comms Group in 2022. Founded a decade earlier, onPlatinum provides managed IT, security, advisory, and communications services to east coast corporate middle-market businesses.

“onPlatinum has a high-quality team with deep customer relationships and technical credibility,” said efex founder and CEO Nick Sheehan. “It takes us further into the mid-market: the larger, multi-site organisations that need enterprise-grade IT but still want a partner who picks up the phone and knows their name. That’s the business we’re building; national scale with local accountability.”

Areas of onPlatinum’s focus include early learning & education, health & aged care, transportation & logistics, engineering & construction, and financial services, with efex saying the transaction would bring extra depth in governance and strategic technology planning at the mid-market level while adding further national scale and specialist talent through its team 70-plus professionals.

“We built onPlatinum around a simple idea of ‘high tech, high touch’, and that has never changed,” said founder and CEO Shannon Overs. “Joining efex gives our customers and our team the backing of a national platform and a broader set of capabilities, while keeping the local relationships and service they value. It’s the right home for what we’ve built, and an exciting next step.”

Crowd IT

Crowd IT was founded in 2020 by Chris Germon – now efex head of healthcare – with a focus on providing managed services together with cloud, security, and IT strategy for Victorian healthcare organisations, in particular those operating in complex clinical environments such as radiology where reliability and responsiveness are critical.

“Healthcare is a sector where specialist IT expertise can have a direct impact on operational outcomes,” Sheehan said. “Chris and the team bring deep experience in the clinical systems, workflows, and environments that healthcare providers rely on every day, strengthening our ability to support clients with both specialist knowledge and the scale of a national provider.”

The firm added the acquisition aligns with its broader growth strategy to deepen its sector capability and expand national reach. Meanwhile, the transition will be ‘business-as-usual’ for existing Crowd IT clients, which will benefit over time from gaining access to efex’s wider portfolio of offerings in cybersecurity, infrastructure, cloud, and AI among other areas.

“Crowd IT has always focused on delivering specialist technology support that reflects the realities of healthcare environments,” Germon said. “Joining efex means we can continue that same approach with greater backing, broader capability, and more opportunity to support providers as their needs evolve. It’s an exciting next step for our team and for the clients we support.”