The march to global scale and geo specific resources in the delivery of services around the Salesforce Customer Success Platform has picked up further pace here at the start of 2016. With the announcements this week that Accenture was acquiring CRMWaypoint of Holland and Capgemini picking up German-based Oinio, it’s clear that this is one of the hottest M&A sectors in the delivery of services and one we don’t expect to see cool off through 2016.
In our inaugural 2015 HfS Blueprint on the Salesforce Services market, a key theme for all of the leading 13 service providers covered was the push to acquire skill to meet rising demand across all of the components of the Salesforce Cloud. In particular securing access to skilled technical staff was critical as enterprise deployments of Salesforce become broader in their functional coverage and more complex in their global deployments. During our briefings with the service providers, we heard continuous messages that building team depth outside of North America was a critical strategic goal for 2016.
Accenture’s (Blueprint Winner’s Circle) acquisition of CRMWaypoint with its 80 Salesforce certifications follows on the heels of purchases of Cloud Sherpas (2015: US with global resources), Tquila UK (2015: UK) and ClientHouse (2014: Germany). In our Blueprint, we noted that one of the challenges facing Accenture in 2016, was the need to ramp up certified staff to meet rising demand and this acquisition specifically addresses that challenge.
Capgemini’s (Blueprint Winner’s Circle) acquisition of Oinio brings 100 salesforce services personnel between Germany and China and helps to address two of the specific challenges identified for 2016. To increase the level of marketing attention on Capgemini’s Salesforce services capabilities and to broaden the experience in Salesforce with greater resource deployment in the Analytics and Marketing Clouds in particular.
So, what does the roster of small to mid-sized independent European focused Platinum Salesforce Partners look like after this week’s announcements as potential future M&A targets for all of the service providers looking to scale in Europe during 2016+. It turns out just at this level of certification (ignoring Gold, Silver and Registered Partners for now) there are still 15 albeit relatively small partners in the ecosystem even without those partners who operate from elsewhere but also still deliver to clients in Europe as well.
4C Consulting (Belgium based with 23 certified Salesforce professionals)
Atlantic Technologies (Italy based with 24 certified Salesforce professionals)
BrightGen (UK based with 66 certified Salesforce professionals)
Businessaligner (Belgium based with 9 certified Salesforce professionals)
factory42 (German based with 17 certified Salesforce professionals)
Fluido (Finland based with 43 certified Salesforce professionals)
Ikumbi Solutions (France based with 10 certified Salesforce professionals)
makepositive (UK based with 51 certified Salesforce professionals)
Nefos GMBH (German based with 18 certified Salesforce professionals)
New Energy (Italy based with 46 certified Salesforce professionals)
Outbox (UK based with 34 certified Salesforce professionals)
PARX (Swiss based with 30 certified Salesforce professionals)
S4G Consulting (Spain Based with 13 certified Salesforce professionals)
Telnext SRL (Italy based with 14 certified Salesforce professionals)
Your SRL (German based with 28 certified Salesforce professionals)
It’s certainly true that many of these service providers may not want to be acquired in 2016 or may be too small to fit the strategic needs of some of the larger partners in this market but we would be very surprised if at least some of these 15 don’t become acquisitions as 2016 carries on so that their capabilities are included in our 2016 HfS Blueprint on Salesforce services.