Salesforce Partners Stir Pot
It’s a sign of Salesforce’s growing strength in the enterprise market that today Cloud Sherpas announced its purchase of Innoveer. The two companies provide consulting and application development services around the world to Salesforce customers. The combined company boasts 230 consultants working from major cities like Atlanta, Boston, New York, Chicago, Dallas, San Diego and San Francisco and countries including the UK, Australia and Japan. If you are looking to court enterprise business, these are places you need to cover.
The importance of this announcement, in my mind goes like this: Salesforce is invading the enterprise with customers like Toyota, Rossignol, Burberry, Coke and General Electric. They’ve signed up the very large consulting companies already, which have dedicated practice areas to cloud computing, and Salesforce, though not exclusive to the company.
A second tier of partners including Cloud Sherpas, Apirio and until today Innoveer, just to pick three, should be able to make a tidy living for the immediate future by taking on projects that the bigger names may not be able to get to. Also, Innoveer is a scrappy company that has penetrated the likes of Abbott Labs, Capital Blue Cross and other big names. So if they can demonstrate vertical expertise say, in pharmaceuticals, they’ll do fine.
As I look at it, with Innoveer and Apirio offices in Boston and the proximity of MIT and that school that Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates dropped out of in Cambridge, Boston solidifies its position as a center of excellence in cloud computing, especially the consulting end.
Meanwhile, the Salesforce juggernaut rolls on into the enterprise. There is by far too much consulting opportunity for the company to take on by itself and it wouldn’t want to. Too much consulting as opposed to straight delivery of its social and cloud solutions, would give the company valuation problems. Financial wizards think differently about a company that does implementations and custom development compared to one dedicated to selling the dog food.
So, this is all good. Cloud Sherpas and Innoveer have something to celebrate and Salesforce’s business is more solid because it has a beefed up delivery arm and it didn’t have to lift a finger to get it. End customers trying to rationalize legacy systems and cloud computing will be the ultimate winners.
