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ThoughtWorks acquired by British private equiteers Apax

DevOps and digital transformation expertise seen as desirable investments

Software development consultancy ThoughtWorks has been acquired by “funds advised by Apax Partners”, a British venture capital and private equity outfit.

Both organisations are at pains to say the deal won't change anything for ThoughtWorks, other than giving it what Guo Xiao, the company's CEO and president, calls fuel for “our next growth phase”. The ShinyHappy™ statement adds “With our combined resources, we are uniquely positioned to help our clients tackle their most difficult challenges, enabling them to change their competitive position through technology.”

Apax's canned statements are a little more revealing, as partner Salim Nathoo says “Software and technological excellence are driving competitive advantage in the corporate marketplace more than ever before, putting agile and advanced development approaches in high demand”, adding that Apax sees “significant opportunities for the company to develop further and look forward to working alongside the existing management team as the company enters its next phase of growth.”

Which El Reg's corp-speak translate-o-tron spits out as “ThoughtWorks is pretty good at this DevOps and cloud-native stuff we keep hearing about, if we give them some cash we might make some dough out of it all.”

ThoughtWorks has over 4,500 employees spread across 42 offices in 15 countries.

The company's chief scientist Martin Fowler was one of seventeen signatories to 2001's Manifesto for Agile Software Development, an enormously influential document that's informed practices like DevOps and continuous delivery that have since become widespread and popular. ThoughtWorks has championed agile methodologies, along with education on how to adopt them, services that employ them and products that make them easier to adopt.

Neither ThoughtWorks or Apax is being crass enough to say how much money will change hands, but the deal is expected to close in late 2017. ®

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