Innoveer Joins Forces With Cloud Sherpas

What’s The Deal?

This week we announced to our staff, customers and partners that Innoveer has been acquired by Cloud Sherpas. Like Innoveer, Cloud Sherpas is a salesforce.com Platinum Partner, and the company is also one of Google’s top enterprise partners. Together, we will be one of the largest Salesforce partners in the world, with over 230 certified consultants serving customers in the US, Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

This is a fantastic combination and I’m very excited to be able to grow and expand our business together with our new colleagues at Cloud Sherpas. We share a common vision: that cloud computing enables enterprises to streamline their businesses, achieve higher growth rates and increase customer satisfaction, plus a whole lot more.

In speaking with Rebecca Wettemann, Vice President of industry research firm Nucleus Research, she told me: “Both Innoveer and Cloud Sherpas are great companies. With your combined years of experience in the market and depth in CRM and salesforce.com knowledge, together you will have the ability to be the dominating player in the Salesforce consulting market.” I agree.

Why Cloud Sherpas?

Our new colleagues at Cloud Sherpas have a strong passion and focus for all things involving cloud technology. They view their business as a “cloud services brokerage,” and their vision prioritizes helping companies pursue and realize business outcomes, using cloud technologies. The challenge, as readers of this blog know, is that navigating the ever-expanding offering of available cloud services and technologies, including buying, implementing and managing multiple technologies, can get complicated. Enter Cloud Sherpas, and the company’s mission, which is to be the service provider who brings it all together. Of course, even a great vision requires stellar execution, and on that front, Cloud Sherpas has achieved top-notch levels of customer satisfaction, working with over 3,500 customers.

… And They’re Not Jerks

After being approached by our new friends at Cloud Sherpas, we’ve discovered numerous cultural similarities in common. We have a “no jerks” hiring policy at Innoveer, and all of the people we have met at Cloud Sherpas have been courteous, extremely professional, pragmatic, collaborative and all-around great to work with.

Their culture, like ours, is extremely client-focused. More than once during our discussions, I needed to miss a meeting or rearrange schedules because of a customer matter. “Clients always come first,” was the response I always got.

The other key cultural similarity between our firms is our dedication to employee satisfaction. Innoveer has one of the highest employee ratings of all consulting firms on Glassdoor, and has been recognized by The Boston Globe as one of the best companies to work for in Massachusetts. Likewise, our friends at Cloud Sherpas have been named, numerous times, to the Atlanta Business Chronicle’s list of the “Best Places To Work.”

Why Innoveer?

Innoveer is a great fit for Cloud Sherpas because of our approach to CRM strategy, as well as our expertise in helping clients pursue transformational business projects. With our exclusive focus on CRM for the past 15 years, Innoveer has developed a deep understanding of the business processes and technology solutions required for success across sales, marketing and customer service domains.

With this knowledge and our experience – honed from working with over 700 enterprise-class customers — we’ve also developed Innoveer’s CRM Excellence Framework, which allows us to identify the most direct path to CRM results. Clients often engage us to lead them through CRM strategy and implementation programs utilizing our frameworks, which establish CRM program objectives, create an understanding of the required CRM capabilities and the technology to achieve these objectives, followed by technology implementation.

Part of our rationale for joining the Cloud Sherpas’ team is to bring this approach to all of its service lines, and to build a Cloud Excellence Framework and set of strategic services that will help enterprises select, implement, adopt and gain efficiencies from cloud technologies. These services and frameworks will set us apart from  other cloud service providers, and further improve our ability to help companies achieve truly transformational projects.

Beyond these strategic payoffs for customers, Cloud Sherpas is also very excited to add Innoveer’s industry experience, especially in the domains of life sciences, insurance and consumer electronics. Of course, there are other reasons why Cloud Sherpas is excited about bringing Innoveer on board, including our talented consultants, great customers, as well as what now becomes Cloud Sherpas’ first operations in Europe and India.

Strategic Opportunity

From a business perspective, I see two primary strategic upsides to joining forces with Cloud Sherpas. First, our combined size, recruiting reach and reputation for high levels of customer satisfaction will enable us to grow our combined business much more quickly than we could do at Innoveer alone. Of course, this will also allow many more customers to benefit from our high-value business transformation services, CRM Excellence Frameworks and rapid cloud CRM implementations.

It’s never been my goal to be the biggest — our objective has always been to be the best — but scale does matter. Salesforce and cloud projects are growing larger. The list of skills needed to successfully plan, implement and deploy a 4,000 seat salesforce.com project, for example, can be quite extensive. Then add in the proficiency required with such tools as Informatica, Marketo, as well as CTI or other related technologies, and you can see that it can take a small village to rapidly make projects as successful as possible. As a larger business, we will be able to take on more of these bigger engagements, continue to meet all of our customers’ needs, as well as achieve the highest levels of customer satisfaction, by being able to deploy the right mix of skills across the organization.

The other opportunity, for us, will be to offer certain cloud services for the first time. These include helping customers migrate a Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes environment to Google Apps. In addition, we all know the critical role played by security in cloud CRM projects, and now we will have experts to hand who can provide and  implement the security capabilities that many larger projects demand, including  single sign-on and advanced authentication.

Here’s to Innoveer joining forces with Cloud Sherpas.

Learn More

If this is your first time hearing about Innoveer, why not watch a video of Panasonic’s Stephen Yeo discussing our work for his company and how it transformed their sales organization? Or feel free to browse our services, employee video testimonials, and perspectives on sales, marketing and customer service.

One More Thing

Innoveer is now part of Cloud Sherpas -- come visit us on our CRM insights on the Cloud Sherpas' Base Camp blog.