Centorrino Technologies plans more acquisitions after DQA merger

Centorrino Technologies’ (CT) acquisition of Canberra-based professional services provider Delivery Quality Assurance (DQA) is one of the first in a series of planned 2025 acquisitions and is set to bring additional capabilities across defence and federal and state government sectors.

DQA has also brought a completely different project management framework, said Centorrino CEO Adam Centorrino.

“We’ve traditionally been waterfall, [DQA] are an agile house, so [it means] that we are able to deliver projects in an agile way,” he said.

The acquisition completed six weeks after the initial sale in November 2024 and has been well received by internal staff, vendor partners and customers, noted Centorrino.

“We intentionally delayed [the announcement] just to make sure it worked [out] well,” he said.

Established in 2017, DQA specialises in secure cloud adoption for the Australian federal government, providing delivery, technical and security services to customers in a protected security context.

This is to bolster CT’s robust capabilities across managed IT services, cloud solutions, cyber security and project delivery.

Now operating under the CT banner, it is business as usual for DQA customers with no disruptions.

“The feedback from both sets of customers with support model and access to expertise has been very positive,” said Centorrino.

In an interview with ARN, Centorrino said  the DQA team members have now come across, including DQA founder Steve Melville, who has taken up a permanent position at CT. As a result, the Australian-owned IT service provider will grow to a total of 400 staff.

“Originally, he wasn’t going to come across with the transition, but then he’s liked being in our business, so he’s taken a full-time role,” he said.

Melville now leads the newly established consultancy arm of CT, which is responsible for assessing customer organisations’ business systems.

“The consulting team’s experience working with large consulting firms like Accenture and McKinsey complements their practical industry and boutique consultancy experience,” said Centorrino. “We decided to create this consulting arm because it has people that know what they’re doing and know what they’re talking about.”

The team will evaluate efficiency, determine the suitability of AI integration and recommend whether existing systems should be retained or removed, noted Centorrino.

“Managed service providers typically work below the line,” he said. “They manage or execute on a strategy that someone’s written. The consultancy arm builds the strategy for organisations and it goes in and does a digital transformation strategy.”

This means CT will now work both above and below the line, explained Centorrino.

Large beast

Centorrino now considers CT to be a “large beast” with the ability to launch dedicated integration teams.

“We’ve rolled out a whole raft of things; we’ve become quite good at it,” he said. “DQA was fully integrated into our business within week, and we took a lot of learnings, but that’s an example of what we can achieve.”

From CT’s perspective, what has helped the IT service provider “significantly” is its executive team, which consists of technical engineers who are “fairly in the detail and understanding of” the business.

“In fact, we are very pedantic about doing things properly,” said Centorrino. “I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to make an engineer do something half-assed. They really struggle with that.”

That includes mergers and acquisitions, like DQA.

“For the merger, we created a role within the business called head of Corporate Development,” Centorrino said. “He came out of private equity and he’s used to buying and assessing businesses.

“James Casey assessed the acquisition for us and executed it.”

The M&A was certainly something which, two to three years ago, Centorrino would have never thought was possible.

“We weren’t even thinking about it,” he said. “Now we’re doing quite a few and we will probably do quite a few. We have four more already on the term sheet; we would expect them to be settled by the end of August.”

Great place to work

For Centorrino, with DQA now under the CT brand, the focus for the IT service provider will be to continuously improve, provide the right customer experience and expand digital services including AI and cyber security.

Importantly, the IT service provider is focused on building a purpose-led, values-driven workplace where culture, innovation and wellbeing sit at the heart of business operations.

Recently, CT placed third among the Best Workplaces in Technology in Australia, as ranked by workplace survey firm Great Place to Work.

“There’s a strong culture of continuous improvement, humility and just making sure that we really focus on that customer experience and employee experience,” said Centorrino. “It’s about making sure we’re getting continuous feedback from team members which is considerable because it can be a thankless industry.”

There’s not many people ringing the service desk to thank people and be told employees are doing an “amazing job”, he noted.

“The onus is really on us to make sure, as an organisation, that we are recognising the effort that our team members put in every day and then building culture of excellence, support and recognition,” Centorrino said.

“I rely on our team members and new team members that join us to tell us what we’re doing good and what’s not good. Then we work on improving those things that we’re not doing so good, fundamentally.”

For Centorrino, CT has continued to evolve, a strong outcome for someone whose first career choice wasn’t becoming a managed service provider.

“I wanted to be a forensic scientist,” he said, “I only gave away that dream when I realised how much university I had to do to be a forensic scientist.”

“From where I wanted to be to now is chalk and cheese.”