Google Apps Partner Cloud Sherpas Triples In Size: What’s Next?
In the Google Apps cloud consulting market, Cloud Sherpas appears to be one of the fastest-growing players. Couple that with the recent Cloud Sherpas-GlobalOne merger, and you’ve got a cloud consulting firm and integrator that’s delivering remarkable growth across the Google Apps and Salesforce.com ecosystem. Skeptical? Here’s the update from Cloud Sherpas CEO David Northington (pictured).
Although the Cloud Sherpas-GlobalOne deal is less than a month old, Northington offered some background metrics:
- The combined revenues for Cloud Sherpas and GlobalOne in 2011 roughly tripled compared to 2010.
- Both Cloud Sherpas and GlobalOne had been growing at similar rates prior to the merger.
- Cloud Sherpas and GlobalOne had very little customer and regional overlap, meaning there are opportunities to cross sell Google Apps and Salesforce.com consulting services.
- The combined company had about 260 employees around the time of the merger. That figure is now closer to 300 employees.
- As a privately held company, Cloud Sherpas does not discuss net income or cash flow. But Northington said the company is well capitalized for growth.
Early Discussions
Merger discussions between Cloud Sherpas and GlobalOne stared in October 2011. Based on similar investor backing, “trust was high right off the bat; we had a letter of intent in place the first week of January,” said Northington.
Talkin’ Cloud’s core question to Northington: How has Cloud Sherpas built a cloud consulting business focused on Google Apps — which is a very low cost service that customers can buy direct for about $50 per user per year? “Sure you can buy direct from Google,” conceded Northington. “But we’ve got value-adds like planning, training and reporting. And we’ve got the services to help customers conduct the migration.”
The same can be said in the Salesforce.com consulting market, Northington suggested. “In the Salesforce.com world, the projects are shorter than in the traditional on-premise CRM world. But the projects can still be transformational. Sometimes it’s for one division, one department or one country region that wants to get quick results. We deliver a shorter sprint and an agile approach rather than a waterfall approach.”
Cloud Frameworks
Instead of building full-blown applications in the Google Apps Marketplace or on Salesforce.com’s Force.com site, Cloud Sherpas is focusing on so-called “frameworks for industry verticals. Rather than putting our own products in the cloud, we have a process framework in hand to help put larger and midsize businesses in the cloud. We started putting those frameworks together in November, first with an asset management framework for wealth advisors.” Cloud Sherpas will announce another framework within weeks, and roughly four frameworks overall this year. Plus, Cloud Sherpas will promote social and mobile capabilities in its efforts. And yes, Cloud Sherpas also does “quite a bit” of development work on Google App Engine and Force.com.
Still, are there synergies between the Google Apps and Salesforce.com consulting businesses? Northington says absolutely yes. “The real point here is the customer finds himself in the middle of convergence; the customers has global teams that want to collaborate now with social media across mobile devices. We believe we offer a combined entity — born in the cloud. We’re not selling long-term on premise deployments. We’re cloud consultants and we can help CIos map a long-term strategy.”
To ensure a successful merger, Cloud Sherpas and Global One are making sure they avoid “any steps that would distract our businesses from fulfilling our customers’ needs. We want to be non-disruptive and very gentile with the integration. At the same time, we do have a very solid merger and integration plan. Top to bottom there are amazing synergies.”
Talkin’ Cloud will be watching to see if Cloud Sherpas executes on those synergies.
