Tech consulting business Capgemini is launching its digital and technology agency offering Backelite in Australia, to answer a need from clients locally around upping their user and customer experience capabilities.
Backelite was first launched in France in 2006 and has offices in the Netherlands, Sweden and now Australia. The model of the break-out agency centres around pairing up traditional consultancy capabilities, such as business transformation and process management, with digital and marketing agencies offerings, such as CX, UX, technology innovation and even media planning.
At an event this morning, CEO of Capgemini locally Nicolas Aidoud explained that now was the right time to launch in this market because the offering now has all the capabilities in place.
“It's been in the works for the last year, we have the capabilities, we started to work with some clients and we're going to have some good success. When we launched the brand we wanted to have something behind it,” he says.
“We have 23 people engaged on assignments; the market is now good for us. We didn't want to launch before because we wanted to have the right project,” he added.
The business is launching with Coca-Cola Amatil, with the bottling arm of the Coca-Cola business using the agency to overhaul its digital and e-commerce capabilities for its B2B business.
This move from Capgemini plays into the rise of both consulting businesses and agencies either upping their agency capabilities or bolstering their consulting rigour, with Aidoud saying that, in Australia, Backelite will be going up against the likes of Accenture's Fjord and SapientNitro.
It also speaks to a trend of businesses looking to consolidate their agency relationships to work with one partner as opposed to many, with Samantha Mitchell, general manager - route to market and e-business for Coca-Cola Amatil saying about the new partnership: “We like to work with one partner, it makes it a lot easier now.”
“You used to have agency people and then you have the people who build the engine and you had to manage so many different businesses and they all had to coordinate their timelines. So it's great just to go to one person, one company and say: 'You own it all now – you're on the hook'.”
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