The Salesforce.com story demonstrates that the cloud and SaaS solutions can add up to interesting business opportunities for traditional systems integrators.
At the “Salesforce Customer Company Tour 2013 – London“ yesterday, 2 May 2013, the presence of a number of large SIs such as Accenture, Capgemini, CSC and Deloitte proved this. During the event I had the chance to quickly discuss their partnership with Salesforce.com and the evolution of their Salesforce.com practices. They each gave a similar message: SIs are excited about the development of salesforce.com related business and have been able to multiply their revenues with no short-term signs of slowing down. Since many of Salesforce’s customers are large enterprises, the related consulting and integration market has already reached quite some momentum. Thus, it has become a main focus for major SIs, and investments into building up capabilities have been shifting towards Salesforce.com.
I can see several common factors across these successes. First of all it is not surprising that all of these SIs with strong Salesforce.com practices have a strong consulting background. They embed their Salesforce.com capabilities within an overall transformation services offering with slightly different shades and names, such as “Customer Experience Management”, “Digital Transformation”, “Enterprise Application Transformation”, “Cloud Transformation”, etc. At the same time, following the providers’ strategy to develop into a platform provider (rather than a mere CRM provider), the “Salesforce.com world” combines a number of key elements that companies are right now struggling with, when engaging into a transformation process, namely cloud, social and mobility. And, of course, it does so while putting the customer (and thus revenues) into the center of attention. Last, but not least Salesforce.com’s platform strategy invites not only software partners, but also the SIs to create value for their customers around the core Salesforce.com SaaS solutions. Value that ranges from custom developments, integration into back-office solutions to creating added value-IP solutions based on the platform.
In terms of vertical, the SIs confirmed that clients from all industries are interested in transforming their customer processes using the Salesforce.com platform and often this approach is especially interesting for them when different, rather independent business units and a large number of international locations are concerned. This confirms that with the right solution, a SaaS strategy is not only interesting for small companies but also very relevant for large enterprises with interesting business opportunities for a growing services ecosystem. Crucial in this process will be that Salesforce.com continues to work hand in hand with its services partners when moving forward.
