Quanton's World of Business Process Automation

In the midst of all the uncertainty wrought by Covid-19 it’s great to be able to announce some exciting, positive news, and the news that Quanton has completed the acquisition of Probity's automation managed services and automation delivery division, Probotics, is certainly that.

Quanton's purpose is to support businesses in creating new ways of working. New Zealand businesses need to adopt future-ready business models and be more productive, or they risk losing relevance and becoming unsustainable. It is time to rethink how businesses operate – and what part automation plays in that.

With this deal, both Quanton and Probity are positioning themselves for growth, while ensuring our customers also reap the benefits.

Probotics clients will move into the Quanton stable, where we will continue to support them with our team including of automation specialists, including the new members joining us through the acquisition and spread across New Zealand.

Probity Managing Director Barry Carruth tells me he was very particular about who he allowed to acquire Probotics – the due diligence pre-deal really did go both ways, with Barry wanting reassurance that his customers and staff would be well looked after as a result of the deal.

With Quanton’s advisory services division and a specialised range of emerging automation and AI automation technologies, we’re keen to help all our customers align digital transformation with their vision and strategy and connect activity to the realisation of business goals.

The relevance of this acquisition

As for the two businesses themselves, for Quanton, this deal strengthens our end-to-end managed services and Intelligent Automation capabilities. The combination of our existing services with Probotics capabilities will enable us to add greater value to our joint customer base as well as delivering a richer offering to the local market.

We’ve made a number of strategic investments in the past year, allowing us to develop capabilities in new areas like auto machine learning and conversational AI, bringing several new market leading intelligent automation technologies to New Zealand including Kore.ai and DataRobot. This has enabled us to transform business operating models to a future focused new way of working through a combination of our technology services and advisory offerings. This has firmly established us as a leader in business process automation space.

Moreover, Quanton have developed a holistic strategy for Intelligent Automation – the use of AI in business process automation which they are now applying with several customers in the New Zealand market.

For Probity, the deal means the company can invest more time in continuing to develop its long-established managed consultancy business based in Wellington, working with customers to drive their financial improvement by balancing the innovative use of technology, while managing the people aspects of change.

Like us here at Quanton, Probotics were among the pioneers for automation in New Zealand and the acquisition is indicative of how far the market has come – and how automation has moved from being a leading edge offering to something on many companies’ radars. As with any technology, and indeed any business, as the market matures you start to get mergers and acquisitions taking place.

Indeed, Gartner’s latest forecasts for Robotic Process Automation in NZ (RPA), which is only a sub-set of the automation market, suggest the New Zealand and Australian markets are going from strength to strength: For New Zealand, Gartner is predicting the market to grow 15.8 percent from 2020, with Australia logging growth of 20.8 percent.

Driving the growth are businesses’ need to harness improved resilience, agility and productivity of RPA as they attempt to meet demands of cost control during Covid-19.

This deal gives Quanton added strength during this difficult time of Covid-19 and sets us up for continued growth.

We welcome the Probotics clients onboard, our new team members who are joining us and look forward to working with them all, while helping our newly diversified customer mix to continue growing their automation programmes, deliver quantifiable benefit and value to their organisations.