Why Accenture\/Cloud Sherpas is a strong fit in terms of talent empowerment and scale for managed Salesforce-based services<\/span><\/p>\nFor Cloud Sherpas, we believed that having depth across the breadth of all the components of the Salesforce Customer Success Platform was a looming challenge as our recent discussions with clients have shown that they want that breadth but saw Cloud Sherpas as much more specialized in the Sales and Marketing Clouds than the other components.\u00a0\u00a0 These clients were telling us that they were increasingly looking for support and coordination across the full Salesforce offering and that they expect their service providers to be able to bring them not just implementation, but also consulting and management skills to support their business needs.<\/p>\n
They aren\u2019t looking for single product implementation partners in 2015, as they may have in years past, but their needs are more comprehensive, so for Cloud Sherpas this meant that they would have to invest further in consulting depth, in addition to product implementation capabilities to meet this evolving demand as Salesforce revenue itself was up 24% in Q2 2016 YoY.\u00a0\u00a0 The other challenge we had noted was that Cloud Sherpas was not as developed in providing ongoing managed services post implementation, both for application or business process delivery around Salesforce, than other leading service providers.<\/p>\n
Simply put, Cloud Sherpas has grown its business to the ~$200 million level largely more through one-off implementations than in the provision of post go-live ongoing support.\u00a0\u00a0 At HfS, we believe the firm was beginning to plateau at this level and needed access to global resources to grow the business to a broader level, both in terms of scale and geographic presence. Many Salesforce clients have indicated to us they want to shift more and more of the tasks around Salesforce management over to others to run and support the platform, and this would also have required a significant investment and shift in focus for Cloud Sherpas. In short, this is a good a time as any for Cloud Sherpas to make a strategic market move, and merging with Accenture is a very realistic and practical move for the firm.<\/p>\n
Both of these challenges for Cloud Sherpas are also strengths for Accenture, with its breadth of Salesforce platform coverage and its extensive management services capabilities.\u00a0\u00a0 However, the challenges for Accenture are different. Even with the largest pool of Salesforce-certified talent, Accenture was still resource constrained especially as clients (including many we spoke with) looking to broaden the depth of their Salesforce deployments and to transform their operations. Part of this challenge is simply being able to recruit and train staff with the right technical and business process skills to enable Salesforce to be not just operational, but a generally effective platform for clients seeking better access to customer data, more responsive marketing campaigns and enabling sales and marketing teams to approach business problems more creatively.<\/p>\n
Accenture was especially short relative to its size in access to higher level certified architects and building a training environment for certifications that could keep pace with demand. Those as it turns out were both strengths of Cloud Sherpas who as a SaaS services start-up had built the specific Salesforce (as well as ServiceNow and Google environments) team development programs and processes that Accenture was lacking.\u00a0\u00a0 Accenture had the scale and the global delivery network to support their clients but now needed the accelerants for growth to match client demand.\u00a0\u00a0 HfS also believes that Accenture needed to also give greater internal visibility to Salesforce and other cloud platforms than had been the case because as big as these capabilities have grown they are still dwarfed internally by the team around SAP, Oracle and other solutions.\u00a0\u00a0 Buying Cloud Sherpas therefore not only adds to the capabilities to grow the practice faster but also adds ~1,100 members to the team across Salesforce, Google and ServiceNow including roughly 600 in Salesforce services alone.\u00a0\u00a0 Like when Accenture purchased Procurian for procurement services BPO back in 2013, HfS believes that the acquisition of Cloud Sherpas acts as an internal organization change agent within Accenture. The need to make the business case of the acquisition concentrates the organization on a shared goal and allows for the re-shaping of resource pools and organizational models that can\u2019t be as easily undertaken just with organic growth. In the case of Salesforce Services, this organizational change is manifested in the decision to create the Cloud First Group to incorporate all of the focused SaaS design, implementation and delivery resources in one place and to further elevate its internal position to the client teams and the leadership of the Technology Growth Platform.<\/p>\n
Therefore, when we look at two challenges that we had identified for each of Cloud Sherpas and Accenture around Salesforce services, we believe that barring any visibility into the actual financial structures of the deal, these challenges are well addressed by this coming together.<\/p>\n
The Bottom-line: Competitor response is critical, otherwise Accenture will continue to lead\u00a0the Salesforce As-a-Service market<\/span><\/p>\nWe believe Accenture not only solidifies its position at the forefront of the market, but it also keeps out its competitors by tying up one the most attractive specialists in Salesforce delivery. Rather like its acquisition of Procurian in 2013<\/a> tied up the Procurement-as-a-Service market, Accenture is banking on Cloud Sherpas having a similar impact in Salesforce services: take a stranglehold position as the market is quickly maturing.<\/p>\nThe big question, now, is whether Accenture\u2019s core competitors in Salesforce services have the appetite – and depth of funds – to make a play for other specialist Salesforce providers such as Acumen, Appirio and Bluewolf. \u00a0Deloitte is consistently avoiding being a managed services provider – preferring its role as consulting partner; KPMG is flirting with it, but seems more enamoured with building a service delivery world for large enterprises around Workday, while IBM sold off its CRM BPO services to Concentrix and needs to make a similar move to Accenture here, if it really wants to be more serious that an SI player in the space. \u00a0HP could be a wildcard, with its strong CRM BPO business and Salesforce relationship, provided it can quickly get past its recent restructuring to make a strategic investment in this area. Capgemini is another contender here, with excellent technical implementation capability, but its BPO services are much more centered around finance and supply chain, that customer centricity.<\/p>\n
HfS readers can click here<\/a> to download a freemium copy of our new POV “Accenture buying Cloud Sherpas unveils the value of As-a-Service Talent” authored by Charles Sutherland and Phil Fersht<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Accenture buying Cloud Sherpas unveils the value of As-a-Service talent Accenture has added considerable strength to its already-strong\u00a0position in Salesforce…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,51,55,56,78,81,91,97,98],"tags":[228],"ppma_author":[19],"yoast_head":"\n
Why Accenture's acquisition of Cloud Sherpas is both an offensive and defensive move - Horses for Sources | No Boundaries<\/title>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n