New company unites experts in the US and UK to provide enterprise IT project teams with hands-on guidance to achieve self-sufficiency in DevOps and continuous delivery.

Sendachi, a technology services firm created to facilitate vibrant, modern software development cultures within corporate IT departments, officially launched with a $30 million investment commitment from venture financier, Columbia Capital. Sendachi was formed through the merger of like-minded IT services companies, Clutch (based in Seattle) and Contino (based in London). Sendachi will be led by former Clutch CEO, Steven Anderson.

Sendachi is tackling one of the most vexing problems facing enterprise IT departments today. Specifically: how to accelerate deployment of new services and service enhancements to gain the agility and velocity that lets entrepreneurial and customer-centric approaches flourish. Achieving this goal is not trivial in the enterprise, where internal development teams are burdened by existing responsibilities to legacy applications and a technology stack that has grown, layer by layer, over multiple decades.

Many of the world’s biggest brands have begun to view software as a strategic differentiator, but creating the next wave of digital products and services requires experience with technologies such as cloud and containers, microservices architectures, and methods like Agile and DevOps. The most disruptive internet-age companies have demonstrated how harnessing these techniques can enable exponential growth and secure competitive advantage. Established enterprises want to follow suit, but need hands-on guidance and technical support to get there.

That’s where Sendachi excels. Its expert teams work alongside clients, mentoring them, so internal staff can experience modern systems and methodologies in a material way, and learn to replicate those strategies and tactics. “Our biggest differentiator,” says Anderson. “Is that we don’t train internal teams in an abstracted way, we participate with them, showing them how by executing their real-world work. It’s not academic; it’s absolutely practical. We show them how to use new stack technologies and work differently to achieve acceleration and quality.”

“Today’s enterprise IT landscape is full of new technologies and methodologies centered on agility and efficiency to help organizations address time, scale, business, competitive and other challenges,” says Jay Lyman, Research Manager, Cloud Management and Containers, 451 Research. “However, the reality is organizations must build on the infrastructure, process and people they already have in place in order to transform effectively and that means leveraging innovative software as well as intensive support to initiate and build out successful DevOps initiatives, applications and services.”

Sendachi is focused on customers in the upper midmarket and large enterprise across industries. Its staff has extensive experience in DevOps and continuous integration/continuous delivery, having worked with Fortune 50 companies in the US and Europe. Sendachi has its global headquarters in Seattle, with its European head office in London. Contino cofounders Benjamin Wootton and Matt Farmer remain with the new company, Wootton as vice president of technology for Europe and Farmer as GM of Europe and former Clutch principal Jerome Gagner has been appointed vice president of technology for the Americas, and former CA Technologies global digital transformation lead Justin Vaughan-Brown has been named vice president of marketing. The firm will hire aggressively over the next year on both continents.

“Across industries, from banking to media and even taxis, the threat or pain of software-based disruption is being felt. Enterprises have to make increasingly bold bets to stay ahead,” comments Wootton. “Over the next two years we will see more reorganizations, more insourcing, more re-platforming and more re-architecture than we saw in the previous decade as companies race to move from software legacy, to software as a competitive advantage. With a growing team on both sides of the Atlantic, we are looking forward to empowering more organizations with the skills, tools and culture to deliver that advantage.”

“Both Contino and Clutch are demonstrating that their enterprise customers can incrementally build from accomplishing low risk projects with new technologies and methods to strategic, enterprise-wide transformations,” says Jason Booma, Partner at Columbia Capital. “Together as Sendachi, the company will continue its different approach to the application outsourcing market where a key customer benefit is an improved technology development capability, not just a great application. We’re excited to work with Steven and the team to collaborate on a business with this customer mission.”