About MA

The journey began in the spring of 1978 when John Bowyer decided to leave his engineering career to set up a recruitment business. John saw a fantastic future in enterprise information technology and thought businesses would need support in finding the best talent to shape their IT systems.

Louis Alexander had met John in IT and shared the same views so much so that he joined the business in February 1979 as a partner.

John was leading sales and Louis was heading up support and operations. The Montreal Associates journey began.

By the end of the 80's, MA had become a key player in the UK IT recruitment sector. SAP had emerged as a leading vendor in the ERP space and the decision was made to set up a specialist recruitment practice dedicated to SAP.

MA was one of the first agencies specialising in SAP and it did not take long to demonstrate that employing experts would shape one of the most successful SAP implementation teams in the UK.

After a decade of SAP specialism, MA was being challenged by customers – particularly large consultancies we had supported – to provide the same service on other ERPs.

It started with PeopleSoft which was popular with many customers on HR technology. This rolled out to become an all ERP practise alongside: Oracle, JDE, BaaN and PeopleSoft specialist recruiters.

After supporting their staffing needs around all ERP, our customers came back with a new challenge. They asked if we could address their skills shortage in emerging CRM and BI technologies?

Having always built our strategy on partnering with customers and addressing their new staffing headaches, we set out to achieve on CRM and BI what we had done for them on ERPs.

We trained and learned all about CRM and BI technologies and set up two new specialist desks in the same year.

Development and Infrastructure were not new topics to us, but, until 2010 our involvement was only around the ERP peripherical requirements.

Working with the best talent in Europe, we felt contractors as much as our customers expected us to go beyond our comfort zone and roll this service beyond our usual boundaries.

We started supporting key customers in all their Development and Infrastructure strategic staffing bottlenecks. Since then, Development and Infrastructure have grown year on year to become our largest and most respected specialist teams.

As an ERP, CRM & BI specialist, we have always kept a close eye on Microsoft strategy within Enterprise Technology. We were also highly involved in Microsoft through our Development and Infrastructure practises.

The presence of Microsoft in our space had become so sizable that we set up a dedicated practise with MS Dynamics and MS SharePoint recruitment specialists.

One of our mottos has always been A client for life. And with us, this is not a philosophy but a business mindset!

Having partnered with the largest consultancies and end-customers for more than 20 years, we have seen some of our contractors making the move back to permanent positions to pursue leadership careers.

To date, our Permanent recruitment services have been delivered on an ad-hoc basis, but it made sense for us to support companies in their talent acquisition. We took up the new challenge of delivering Permanent recruitment services on SAP and Microsoft, setting up dedicated desks.

Over the last decade, MA has a proven track record in investing in new and emerging enterprise technologies. Since 2013, we have also developed our own approach and style to Permanent recruitment.

Cyber Security and big data are not new technologies, but they pose a challenge for IT leaders - and we have decided once again to support our customers, setting up specialist desks for each.

MA has operated the German market from London for almost a decade. In 2015, we decided that the German market needed to be addressed not only from our headquarters but also from a local German hub with a view to get closer to clients and candidates.

In the spring of 2016, Montreal Associates GmbH was set up and our first continental office was opened in Frankfurt.

In October 2017, MA opened its third office in Barcelona.

The decision was based on the fact Barcelona has a strong emphasis on breeding tech start-ups while being viewed as one of the top Tech European cities. Already hosting the World Mobile Congress, Barcelona has proven itself a breeding ground for Tech start-ups.

Sales Director Anthony Blomet relocated to Barcelona in late 2017 to set-up the office.

Having experienced substantial growth over the past few years, it was time to step back and take a good look at who MA had grown to become. We quickly established the need for a fresh identity, a fresh strategy and a new mission and vision for MA's next chapter. 

Our client & candidate community and our passion and curiosity for technology will always remain the core of MA. Bringing this with us into the future, our new strategy focuses us to work towards helping create a smarter technological future by doing what we do best - connecting curious people.