McKinsey acquires cloud consultants Candid Partners

McKinsey & Company has acquired Atlanta, Georgia-based cloud specialists Candid Partners. The move came after the two organisations worked together on a project for a large client to help them with a major cloud transformation.

Recognising the value of the relationship and synergies, McKinsey brought the entire team of more than 100 senior technical experts from Candid into the fold.

“We were immediately struck by the impressive depth and collaborative approach of the people we met at Candid Partners—and their track record of both solving complex technical challenges and delivering cloud programs for some of the world’s largest organisations,” said Steve Van Kuiken, a senior partner and global leader of McKinsey Technology.

“With Candid Partners’ people and knowledge, we will scale our technical capabilities and accelerate the rate at which we can help our clients achieve tangible business value from cloud adoption,” added Liz Hilton Segel, managing partner for North America.

Who are Candid Partners?

Candid Partners helps organisations to drive revenue, innovation, and increase profitability via the cloud. They have performed more than 250 cloud initiatives and are the only cloud firm that automates every stage of the journey. Candid was also the first US-based company to successfully migrate a mainframe to public cloud.

“As an organisation, Candid Partners applauds technical depth, creative problem solving, and a total focus on getting the job done,” explains Merrick Olives, who co-founded the firm with John Peak. “What our people value most is the opportunity to work on the most challenging technology projects out there – McKinsey can help our team realise this.”

This partnership comes at a time when companies are increasingly turning to digital transformation and especially cloud for its advantages over traditional IT models in terms of flexibility, speed, resilience, and scalability – critical features for virtual working that have become more important during the pandemic. 

“We have assembled a group of very experienced people including engineers, developers, architects and agile coaches. When you have a client migrating a critical financial application into the cloud, we can bring experts to the table who’ve done this multiple times,” says Olives. “Our average technical person is 20 years into his or her career, which makes a big difference.”

Cloud opportunity for end-to-end transformations

The McKinsey-Candid Partners team will help clients with everything from initial strategy, business-case development and road mapping through to designing the architecture, migrating applications, and optimising workloads. The emphasis will be on enabling organisations to focus on innovation, speed and scale.

For example, once global travel is back on the agenda, airlines can streamline their customer experiences, manage global information networks, and route crews and aircraft more effectively. 

Healthcare systems – currently under unprecedented pressure – can rationalise complex infrastructures and deploy patient services that are more mobile and flexible. Automotive manufacturers – again hit hard due to global supply chain disruption during the pandemic – can seamlessly connect thousands of suppliers in real-time across the value chain.

“We believe the cloud holds immense potential, but most companies are only scratching the surface”, says Steve Van Kuiken. “We are going to continue to invest in this area to bring the most distinctive capabilities to our clients.”