Slalom celebrates successful 1st year in Houston
Roughly a year ago Slalom Consulting established its office in Houston. 12 months later the decision to enter the Houston region can be dubbed a large success. The office has grown from near scratch to a team of 85 consultants, working at the intersection of strategy, business and IT, with a focus on the oil & gas and healthcare industries.
Founded in 2001, US-based Slalom Consulting employs approximately 2,200 consultants. In addition to traditional management consulting services, the firm offers a range of IT-related services, on the back of partnerships with companies including Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Amazon Web Services, and Apple. Earlier this year the consultancy was named one of the 10 best consulting firms to work for.
More or less a year ago the business advisory chose Houston as its 14th North American market, based on the region’s “rich history of successful companies in industries like energy, and healthcare”. To lead the operation the consultancy hired Jeff Williams, who previously worked for 17 years at Accenture, in his last role as a Managing Director. At Accenture, Williams contributed to dozens of management and information technology engagements, mainly within the energy & utilities ecosystem.
From the start-up base a year ago, the office has in the past 12 months been through staggering growth, bringing it to its current size of 85 consultants. “The first three months were all about setting up our structure and leadership and then around the end of the summer, we started seeing the business take hold. From August through the end of the year we saw a pretty significant growth, ending the year around 65 employees.” Three months later, the tally has risen by another 20 professionals.
The services portfolio has in line with the growth been significantly deepened, in both the management and IT consultancy domain. “We offer strategic technology services in Custom Development & Mobility, Portals and Collaboration, Information Management & Analytics, CRM, Infrastructure & Cloud, and Security & Technology Risk services. Our Business Consulting practice supports new and existing IT processes and delivery. We specialise in Strategy & Operations, Organisational Effectiveness, and Delivery Leadership”, comments Williams.
“In Houston, we’re building an incredible team of smart, talented, out-of-the-box thinkers with experience in delivering strategic solutions”, Williams adds. Looking forward, he anticipates to continue the growth trajectory, highlighting two key growth drivers. “Companies are looking at how they take advantage of the next generation of technologies. How they wring more productivity from their assets. How they do things in a more agile fashion. How they take advantages of things like cloud to reduce their operating costs.” The second topic he points at is security. “When you think about the oil and gas industry, there’s a lot of physical infrastructure out there that needs to be secured. There’s a lot of data that needs to be secured. And if you look at the healthcare market and think about patient data and the personal data that they deal with … security is definitely a very hot topic here in Houston right now.”
