Smaller integrators could be on track to garner more business in partnership with Salesforce as the vendor sets its sights on the emerging small- and medium-sized business (ESMB) segment in the local market.
“We’ve made a decision in this region to look at ESMB, as a market,” Salesforce’s industries, innovation and partners alliance vice president for Asia Pacific, Charles Woodall, told ARN at the company’s Salesforce World Tour event in Sydney on 6 March.
“And we’ve actually split it off as a horizontal for the first time. It’s a first amongst my peers globally as well, because we believe that the smaller companies, the rate they are adopting Salesforce is unprecedented at the market,” he said.
According to Woodall, the move to focus on the smaller end of town is largely customer-driven, with the cloud customer relationship management (CRM) software vendor simply responding to industry demand.
While the vendor continues to conduct much of its business at the top end of town in partnership with global systems integrators like IBM Bluewolf, Accenture and Deloitte, the SMB move is set to see smaller partners presented with more Salesforce-related opportunities in the local market.
“We build up the ecosystem based on customer demand, and the customer demand in that ESMB space is very high at the moment,” Woodall said. “They’ve really welcomed the opportunity, and we’re in the process of talking to 10 or so partners at the moment [that] are doubling their investment in that space.
“The opportunity for the [smaller partners] for growth in that space is huge,” he said.
Tapping into more services
At the same time, partners are seeing greater opportunity by addressing more of their customers’ broader challenges by tapping into Salesforce’s extended portfolio of offerings, according to Woodall.
“In government, for example, how do you get predictive analytics, how do you take Einstein [artificial intelligence] and apply that to your existing cloud ecosystem itself?” Woodall said. “[How do you] start looking towards understanding your data and how to process big data more effectively?
“Using Salesforce as a platform as opposed to the bespoke clouds which they have done historically, I think that’s where we’re seeing the trends go, and the partners are making great investments,” he said.
Although the SMB segment presents a market ripe for the vendor and its partners within which to expand, the company continues to thrive among large enterprises, with verticals such as government and financial services standing as two of the biggest market sectors for the company.
Indeed, during the vendor’s latest global earnings call at the end of February, its vice chairman, president and COO, Keith G. Block, paid particular attention to the company’s traction within Australia’s financial services sector, calling out one client in particular -- AMP.
“We continue to see just excellent momentum in financial services, specifically in Australia where we are deepening our relationship with AMP, a leading wealth management company,” Block said at the time.
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