O.C. Tanner, the global leader in employee recognition and workplace culture, has signed an agreement to acquire Accumulate Loyalty Services Limited, a leading Australian provider of employee recognition and incentive solutions. 

O.C. Tanner and Accumulate will begin their work of creating engaging workplace cultures together as the new relationship becomes official after the completion of the sale process on October 31, 2017.

This acquisition of an Australian company by OC Tanner gives them a wider global reach and helps them establish their presence in an important market globally. 

It’s an interesting acquisition primarily because Accumulate is a services company and OC Tanner will add the global expertise and technology solutions to the equation. 

This goes to show that in the world of HR services, while technology is an important factor if you build and scale a business based on deep understanding of a particular subject matter, it’s an equally great proposition. 

Both companies have complimentary offerings and would surely benefit from understanding of the Employee recognition and benefits domain coupled with local market dynamics. Accumulate has a focused solution for sales & channel incentives and that could be a great addition to the overall OC Tanner suite. One can expect to see some technology product being added or acquired to further augment this offering.

This acquisition of a local market leader by a global player further indicates the wave of consolidation in the overall HR services and HR tech space. As the service providers mature and become more domain specific such consolidation will continue to increase. We have seen this consolidation happen even 10 years ago when SAP acquired SuccessFactors, Oracle acquired Taleo, IBM acquired Kenexa, Skillsoft acquired SumTotal and ADP acquired Workscape. All these were domain specific solutions acquired by large global solution providers for their domain knowledge & local market leadership. 

While recruitment technology has been hogging the limelight with Randstad acquiring Monster and then Microsoft acquiring Linkedin, one can realize that this trend of domain specific consolidation and acquisition in HR space in general & in HR technology space in particular will continue to grow.